Barkers work then exemplifies the plurality and political liveliness within the post-war novel even outside the dynamism of post-colonial writing or the aesthetic fallout of postmodern theory. Her refining of earlier feminist and socialist novelistic conventions places her as a writer of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. But her reworking of both English history and the social-realist novel is a salutary reminder of how diversely these terms have been interpreted in British writing throughout the post-war period.