Josephine Pinckney began her career as a poet and did not publish her first novel until her forty-sixth year. The early discipline of writing verse aided in making her five novels triumphs of meticulous craftsmanship and polish. One point that reviewers stressed time and again is the artistry of her "chiseled" style, which Pinckney explained as coming from slow and painstaking composition and a "lot of time with the pumice stone." Her novels are the conceptions of a mature mind. By her first novel, her themes had been clearly thought out, thus at least partly explaining why critics frequently praised her keen intelligence and firm grasp of reality.

Pinckney was not a sensational writer. Although violence and sex are part of the world she created, she never exploited them. Neither was she a sentimental novelist. Her hallmarks, after an effective style, are an almost eighteenth-century restraint, an urbane...