Is there an element of recantation here, a sense of penitential return to subjects previously explored with too light a heart? One of the most vivid clashes of perspective in The Tempest, a play Amis explicitly positions in a significant relationship to The Pregnant Widow, comes when Miranda, enthralled by the men shipwrecked on the island, memorably exclaims: "O brave new world/That has such people in't!" To which Prospero — jaded? saddened? resigned? envious? — replies: "'Tis new to thee." The sober correction of youthful enthrallment is the dominant theme of Amis's novel, as well as of Shakespeare's play, and the final metamorphosis to which they both glance forward is the ultimate metamorphosis of life into death.

The Pregnant Widow is artfully constructed, then. But, to pose a more radical, or perhaps just more flat-footedly factual, question, is its basic premise true? Did the 1970s really see the first female rakes? One thinks of the antics of the Empress Theodora in the theatre of Byzantium, or the activities that we are told went on the precincts of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Was Amis's generation really the first who had to cope with, as Keith puts it, girls who are cocks? Whatever the qualifications suggested by a longer historical perspective, the sexual metamorphosis of the 1970s was no doubt felt as a great change, and The Pregnant Widow gives that experience a satisfying literary shape, as the cockiest, rangiest author of the 1970s exchanges Scotch for Sanatogen, and Quaaludes for glucosamine.