Elderly novelist Maurice James Kingsley transforms the experiences of his model niece, Jessica, into a bestselling novel about a beautiful young woman called Blackeyes.

Jessica is appalled to find her life stripped for material and rewritten through her uncle’s sexual imagination. But as the boundaries between author, model and fictional character collapse, Blackeyes begins to resist the fate imposed upon her.

Using stories within stories, fractured chronology and voices that invade one another, Potter examines the ownership of women’s experience: who gets to narrate it, who profits from it and whether exposing objectification can avoid reproducing its gaze. It is an intentionally unstable novel about beauty as commodity, sexual violence, authorship and fiction’s ability to both imprison and liberate its subjects.

Potter adapted the novel into a lavish 1989 BBC series, which became one of the most bitterly contested broadcasts of his career. Intended as an attack on institutionalised sexism, it was accused of indulging the very objectification it condemned, earning Potter the tabloid nickname “Dirty Den” and leaving the work suspended in a particularly vicious argument between representation and complicity.

Later paperback printing with television tie-in cover. Faber and Faber, 1991. Originally published in 1987. Paperback. Good condition, with rubbing, scratching, creasing and shelf wear to the covers.