Swan is a writer and journalist who was also a performance artist from 1975 to 1979, performing odes on subjects like self-pity and figure skater Barbara Ann Scott. But she is best known for her critically praised fiction, which has been published in twenty countries. Gender is often a theme in her earlier books, which examined the dilemma of inhabiting a female body in a male-dominated Western culture. One critic called her "a contemporary Charles Dickens” while another critic, The New Yorker writer James Wood, said her novels belong to the category of "the avant-garde of content", a term Wood uses to describe his belief that the progressive development of fiction writing now centres on the subject matter a writer chooses to explore. Swan's latest novels have expressed a young woman's longing for fatherly love.