Anyone who reads fiction knows there is a male canon and a female one. Perhaps the present-day preference for Amis or Atwood is simply a matter of temperament, or perhaps it goes back to Richardson and Fielding and the masculine assertion for sense over sensibility. Yet the true reader, like the true writer, is concerned with more than gender; and to hide behind it is to render us something less than human.

Jeanette Winterson and A L Kennedy are two of the leading writers of the new generation. Both are female and have won many prizes. One has gone from wild popularity as an outspoken lesbian to a chorus of (largely male) disapprobation; the other received the accolade of being a 1996 Booker judge, and benefits from the current exaltation of Scottish writing. A L Kennedy has been compared to Winterson, and both, as it happens, have written about passion and physics in their present books. …

A L Kennedy advertises her sexlessness by her initials, but conforms to the female canon in writing exclusively about love and sex. Not all of her stories succeed, (a couple, such as “A Short Conversation” have only their shortness to commend them) but those that do make Original Bliss a delight.

The sensation of being charmed is slow but irresistible. Kennedy is no show-off or pyrotechnician. She has little dabs of wit (“Some Americans simply had too many teeth … seemed almost dangerously well-prepared for feeding”) and wicked jokes (a “Cupid Stunt” who turns out to be far from stupid) but what they're set in seems so unremarkable that it's rather like suddenly noticing how many bright and beautiful colours are woven into an apparently drab tweed. Subtle, erotic and never silly, Kennedy's physicists convince as Winterson's do not—even when jerking off in space.

The title story is the most ambitious and accomplished. It concerns a love affair between a victimised wife and a lonely genius. Helen is consumed by her loss of faith, Edward by his addiction to pornography. Their painful intimacy and ultimate escape into happiness are almost worthy of Jane Gardam or Francis King.

It is regrettable that Kennedy will probably be read solely by women, and that Winterson will have to endure yet another critical drubbing by men. The one deserves more, the other less. But that, alas, is the trouble with separate canons.