["The Young and Beautiful"] has economy and wit and a penetrating astringency of mind. Miss Benson brings off her scenes and cameo portraits with a flinty, chiseled touch; affectionately, but without condescension, she records the flavor of the period. I like, too, her critical attitude towards American experience…. If there is any fault in "The Young and Beautiful," it lies perhaps in the nature of the material. The knowledge of self to which Josephine comes, however dramatic, is essentially a novelist's insight, or the 'epiphany' of a short story: it demands a fullness of comment the coarser stage cannot supply. We take leave of Josephine at the very moment her real drama of consciousness begins, and for Miss Benson's climax to be more than a fait divers, or a kind of moral sensation, the seed of awareness should have been planted much earlier. (p. 94)

Richard Hayes, "The Stage...