English novelist, social critic, and translator who reacted against traditional realist literature by inventing new forms for her own works.

Figes received a B.A. with honours from Queen Mary College in London in 1953 and subsequently worked for various publishing companies until 1967, when she became a full-time writer. Her poetic novels explore the inner lives of the characters, often through a stream-of-consciousness technique. Equinox (1966) examines the breakup of a marriage and the protagonist's subsequent struggle to rebuild her world. It was published about the time of the author's own divorce from George Figes. Winter Journey (1967) relates a day in the life of an isolated old man. Each of the seven chapters of Waking (1981) begins with a woman awaking at a different stage in her life, from idyllic childhood to approaching death. Her later novels include Light (1983), The Seven Ages (1986), Ghosts (1988), The Tree of Knowledge (1990), The Tenancy (1993), and The Knot (1996).

In addition to fiction, Figes wrote several books of criticism, including Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (1970) and Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850 (1982), and an autobiography, Little Eden (1978), which examines her father's imprisonment at the Dachau concentration camp and the family's subsequent escape to England.