Mrs. Benson [in "The Young and Beautiful"] is clearly attempting something a little more ambitious than a study of a shallow adolescent egocentric. I should say, without being precisely sure, that she thinks of Josephine as a victim of a time of peculiar spiritual chaos for the young (the action of the play takes place in 1915), and that she believes there is a small but authentic tragedy in the story of a girl whose enormous vitality might have found some satisfactory outlet under almost any other social conditions but who is now condemned to a series of easy conquests that she finds dismayingly empty without quite knowing why….

The fact that it never comes through very clearly or convincingly [on the stage] is, I imagine, mainly the result of her extraordinary gift—earlier manifested, of course, in the stories that made up "Junior Miss"—for writing so charmingly...