From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; ... from hardness of heart, ... Good Lord, deliver us, intones the litany of the Book of Common Prayer. The list includes public disasters and private failings and is wisely ambiguous about their sources. To make sense of the twentieth century is to wrestle with evil, to shape a framework that can relate private values to the public catastrophes of holocaust, war, and terrorism. For writers of modern fiction, this means designing plot and character to imply judgments about moral responsibility. Serious contemporary women novelists are discarding the drawing room heritage of women's fiction and entering the public realm of war, politics, and economic upheavals. In so doing, they are developing some distinctively female approaches to the moral assessment of public issues. Public issues necessarily involve private actors, and literature by men often represents private morality through sex-linked stereotypes: the mustachioed villain leers over the frail ingenue; the bloodhound detective bays, Cherchez lafemme. Women writers reject these male stereotypes as they try to define moralities that can apply to both public and private actions. In this essay, I argue that contemporary women writers have developed a new set of sex-linked oppositions between male and female kinds of evil and that the female evils often spring from current psychological anxieties about motherhood and daughterhood. These writers dramatize a dual moral standard: in the public realm, victimized women blame male power, but their private villains are rejecting mothers and their moral heroes those who assume maternal responsibility. In order to explore the links between public and private morality in women's fiction, I analyze four important recent novels that are structured on a two-world paradigm. That is, each of these novels contrasts our society with an alternate, fictional culture. This contrast exaggerates and therefore clarifies questions about the nature of private action and the responsibility for public evil. Who is doing these terrible things, the fictions ask us; who is to blame? The four writers-two English and two American-display comparable urgency about connecting personal and political values in contemporary society. They share a modern gloom about the individual's social alienation and about the public madness of pollution, crime, and war. For all four, these are among the worst of days, and they may be our collective last. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor use the conventions of utopian fiction to foreshadow apocalypse through inner dreams and outer chaos; in Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age and Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer, private values must cope with the violence of Third World revolutions. The four writers espouse very different political perspectives-Piercy's radical feminism, Lessing's mysticism, Drabble's liberalism, and Didion's conservatism-yet they develop surprisingly similar visions of personal moral responsibility and of public evil. For each of these four novels, I describe the fictional forms it gives its two worlds, the nature of evil in each, and the link between public and private morality in each. I conclude that these four very diverse women authors code good and evil in similar, gender-related ways, ways very different from traditional male stereotypes. Unlike the other three novels, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time takes an explicitly feminist approach to its subject matter.1 Piercy introduces us to her poor Chicana heroine Consuelo at a crux of her life. Connie is just about to attack her pregnant niece's pimp with a bottle, and she has just met Luciente, an emissary from a better future