[In "The Door of Life"] Enid Bagnold gives us, with candor and subtlety, an inward-gazing study of the companionship between a woman and her child, in the days just before and just after birth. At a time when so much of the world's attention is upon the destruction of life, this tender and explicit revelation of lifegiving is a thrill to enjoy. But I fear it probes too clinical, too frank, too tender, to please maternal readers. A deep and I daresay a wise instinct usually withholds the creators of life from articulate comment on the dreamy strangeness of its process.

For fathers, however, this is superb. Hardly since the famous childbirth in the Shandy family has the drama of a household in parturition been so astonishingly rendered. But in this story the father is appropriately removed from the scene; he has gone off on a three months'...