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Apart from the suspicion that the two parts of the novel do not unite, I think the only reproach that can be made concerns the tempo of the book; it does not move quite quickly enough. It is true that the action takes place in a short while, but there seems a lot of "marking time." The pasts of the characters have to be tacked on to them, and the action held up thereby. It is as if they were being stuffed out or blown up to make them big enough to match their tragic destinies.

It is an exhausting book. In it, as in a room it describes, "there is present an excess of beauty and an excess of being." Miss West has every quality a novelist needs: startling descriptive powers, a never-failing felicity of phrase, subtle and individual humour, most acute insight into character, and, above all, convictions. Her smile at Ellen's feminist enthusiasms is the smile of one who shares them, and it is by her own feminism that she brings the invaluable gift of passion to her work. The title of the book is explained by a sentence on the title-page: "Every mother is a judge who sentences her children for the sins of the father." This may serve for this particular book, but as a generalization seems to me rather meaningless. One might, I should have thought, say with equal justice: "Every father is a judge who sentences his children for the sins of the mother." But then criticism is eventually a personal business, and the critic now writing is not a woman.

Having taken refuge in sex distinctions, I will end by suggesting that if for this year's fiction, a man deserves the first prize—I mean of course Mr James Joyce, a woman deserves the second—I mean Miss Rebecca West.