The cabbie who drove me the few miles from Durham to Pat Barker's home in Newton Hall announced that we were entering the largest housing estate in all of Europe. Newton Hall was also, he added and proved, Europe's easiest estate to get lost in: Some streets, Barker's among them, had not made it onto the map he thumbed with an air of practiced futility. Barker must be familiar with the sensation of being uncharted. Prior to Regeneration, she'd written mainly about the working-class women of England's industrial north: an unplaceable set of interests in terms of the expectations and prejudices of British publishing. Barker devoted much of her imaginative energy to establishing a literary resonance for what she calls the "voices that had not been listened to."

Her fifth and latest novel takes her work in an unpredictable direction. Regeneration, set in World War I Scotland, excavates the suspect foundations of a wartime masculinity which had to appear at all costs detached and commanding. It is a tribute to Barker's imaginative reach and the generosity of her feminism that she can produce such an affecting novel about the impact of war on men, and that she can do so without forfeiting the caliber of insight that distinguished Union Street, Blow Your House Down, and The Century's Daughter.

I asked her about her literary beginnings as we sat at the kitchen table, a gale battering the windows as if intent on blowing the house down—or at least testing its foundations. Barker explained that she had set out to write sedate middle-class novels, then decided that if her efforts were going to remain unpublished, she might as well attempt the book she had always dreamed of writing. The result, Union Street, became the first of three remarkable novels that draw on her memories of the working-class women of her childhood, their blunted dreams and bloody-minded heroism alike. These novels all testify to Barker's gift for perfectly pitched dialogue—a salutary antidote to that tradition of "committed" writing which embraces the working class with a bleeding heart and a cloth ear. By the late '80s, Barker had established a voice that was regional in the richest sense: dark, wry, sometimes outrageous, but never coy or merely dutiful.

Yet her success at depicting communities bypassed by the great motorways of Brit Lit brought its own dilemmas. That much became clear when I asked her why, with Regeneration, she chose to break so radically with her established haunts. What had prompted her to hazard a novel about people in every sense remote from her—young, male, upper-middle-class World War I officers in a Scottish mental hospital? Her grandfather, Barker told me, first ignited her curiosity about the war, plying her with tales of his military exploits while toying with his old bayonet wound. But the incentive to write Regeneration arose equally from her sensation of being boxed in, of finding her books held to standards of "authentic sociology" rather than fiction: "I had become strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working-class feminist … label, label, label. You get to the point where people are reading the label instead of the book."

For most of her career, Barker has found herself bereft of literary forerunners. D. H. Lawrence and David Storey wrote northern, working-class novels, but even they had proved of little use, as their female characters seemed alien or peripheral. In turning to World War I for her imaginative terrain, Barker faced the unfamiliar risk of smothering beneath a surfeit of precedents: "It takes a long time to have an original idea about something which has whole libraries devoted to it."

The originality of Regeneration flows largely from the unorthodox decision to set her war novel not on the battlefront but in a mental hospital. Craiglockhart, just outside Edinburgh, is a hospital crammed with war casualties, a "living museum of tics and twitches." By stationing the action away from the trenches, Barker can press beyond the point where most war novels are content to end. Regeneration asks not just "How does war feel?" but "What ideals of manhood make the conduct of war possible?" and "Why have these ideals failed?" Barker's protagonist, Dr. William Rivers, an army psychologist, inhabits the cusp between military and civilian life. This pioneering psychologist, neurologist, and anthropologist is ideally placed to grapple with the enormous issues the novel raises, most notably the crippling effects of emotional repression as a measure of manliness.

Barker reimagines the intense relationship that evolved at Craiglockhart between Rivers and his most renowned patient, the young poet Siegfried Sassoon. Decorated for "conspicuous gallantry," Sassoon arrives at the hospital in 1917 after stirring up a storm in Britain with a public indictment of the war. Sassoon's stand leaves the authorities two choices: to court-martial him or declare him psychologically unsound. His friends, particularly Robert Graves, intercede, eventually persuading him to avoid a court-martial by undergoing treatment at Craiglockhart, purportedly for shell shock. Sassoon faces a wracking dilemma. Either he accepts rejection by his troops as a traitor and pacifist or he submits to a plot to have his deepest principles swept away as "symptoms of mental collapse."

Rivers's quandary is no less tormenting. His morally, intellectually, and erotically intense exchanges with Sassoon sharpen his doubts about the ethics of his work. To Rivers has fallen the melancholy task of restoring disturbed officers to "sanity," but this simply means sending them back to the trenches that have undone them in the first place. Rivers believes the war-damaged men need to face and speak their fears. His colleague, Dr. Lewis Yealland, sees breakdown on the battlefront as a species of lapsed manliness. (Yealland remedies "weakness" like hysterical mutism by applying lit cigarettes to the patient's tongue and electric shock waves to his larynx.)

Rivers's great breakthrough was rejecting the conventional wisdom that officers broke down in the trenches because they were too feeble to cope with the bruising life of action. Instead, he saw analogies between the nervous disorders prevalent among men at war and the patterns of breakdown among women in peace-time. Young soldiers' training encouraged them to project the combat zone as a Great Adventure that would sort the men from the boys by testing their command of the virtues of courage, discipline, emotional control, and physical prowess. Yet the war offered anything but a life of action: "They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move," Barker writes. "The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known."

Paradoxically, women were more likely than men to experience the Great War as a Great Adventure. While male soldiers fought the demons of impotence in the trenches, war released tens of thousands of women from the confines of home. Work in the munitions factories allowed them to secure—at least for the duration of the war—new freedoms. War offered other forms of release to women whose domestic lives had degenerated into a state of war. In Regeneration, Lizzie, a survivor of battery, asks: "Do you know what happened on August 4th 1914?… Peace broke out. The only little bit of peace I've ever had. No, I don't want him back when it's over. As far as I'm concerned the Kaiser can keep him…. I'm going to get meself some false teeth, and I'm going to have a bloody good time." As Barker's other novels testify, for working-class women that "bloody good time" didn't last. The war ended, the men returned and reclaimed their jobs.

All of Barker's work reveals her singular gift for immersing readers in the atmospherics and pathologies of violence—whether rape, murder, trench warfare, torture, or unremitting confinement. Among the victims, she reserves her greatest sympathy for young people—19-year-old officers, 12-year-old rape survivors, 16-year-old prostitutes—whose early exposure to brutality plunges them into premature, bewildered versions of adulthood. Impatient with the official heroisms that crowd the bookshelves, Barker reiterates in Regeneration her attraction to the spectacular yet hidden braveries that sustain "unliterary" lives. (She's more impressed by Sassoon's inconspicuous than his public gallantry: His most impressive act of bravery, she suggests, is to deny his own need to be seen as hypermasculine.) Few novelists are so unsentimentally animated by people's ability to chalk up small, shaky, but estimable victories over remorseless circumstances. Readers come away from all her novels with an altered feeling for the boundaries and capacities of human courage.

But despite the rich continuities in her work, Barker has no doubts about which kind of writing taxed her talents more. Working on Regeneration, she was astonished at how much easier it was to infuse ideas into a novel populated by public school, Oxbridge men: "You can have all these bloody dons sitting around tables talking about the theme of the book. Frankly, I think it's a doddle compared to writing about semiliterate or illiterate people: you can have your character simply articulate what the book is about. It's money for old rope compared with what is required when your character cannot possibly do that."

During our conversation, Barker seemed, at times, justifiably worried that all the attention Regeneration has garnered might detract from the achievements of her earlier work. There's something all too predictable about the sequence of her success. The British press, after rationing praise for earlier books—American reviewers were less stinting—is suddenly all plaudits. And the BBC plans to screen a version of Regeneration next year to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. Is the novel's success simply a repeat of the old story that a book about men's doings is more interesting to men—who constitute the majority of publishers, reviewers, critics, and prize-givers? Though Regeneration will probably go down in the annals of publishing history as the book that put Barker on the map, it's important to recognize that, with the exceptions of Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie, no British writer in the past 20 years has produced three novels to equal Union Street, Blow Your House Down, and Regeneration.

After the interview, we ventured outside. Beyond Barker's garden lay—and it seemed appropriate—a bewitching woodland on one flank, a military base on the other. She mentioned that she had long held two desires: to see one of the area's plentiful but elusive badgers, and to have a hedgehog take up residence in her garden. Both dreams were realized, though not quite in the way she'd imagined. A hedgehog came to stay and a badger devoured it. She told the anecdote lightly, with a storyteller's confidingness and a trace of that luminous melancholy which distinguishes all her tales about our halting efforts to stave off violence and despair.