September 1960
These twelve stories make me think of a very well-designed hors d’oeuvre with deliberately predominating factors of colour and taste. They are written with the ease and economy which amounts to brilliance: in appearance they are all about marriage and children; in taste they are about several kinds of loneliness or isolation. Collections of short stories may have certain disadvantages, but they have one powerful start on the novel. If you want to make some statement and have the skill to make it from twelve different points, you have a greater chance of being understood without being accused of repetition. Mrs. Mortimer makes her points - about the difficulties or impossibility of communication, about people thrusting themselves or one another into little cages of habit, about the mechanical momentum that behaviour can acquire after the original instinct or desire has vanished. In spite of her capacity to entertain, one has the feeling that the particular view of human relations which she has fixed upon shocks her, and also that the shock must either diminish or considerably increase before she can have anything more to say about it.