Maureen Duffy frequently employs Freudian ideas and Greek mythology as frameworks for her writing. Her distinctive style utilizes contrasting voices and streams of consciousness, often incorporating the perspectives of outsiders. Her novels align with a European literary tradition that explores reality through language and questioning, rather than traditional linear narrative. Influenced by modernism and authors like James Joyce, her work demonstrates that the novel can be fantastical, experimental, and political, celebrated for its keen eye for detail, ear for language, and powerful imagery.
This work is a narrative history of England covering 3000 years, which explores the political, religious, environmental and physical influences that have arrived at the myth that is England.