Elizabeth Bowen has not written a short story as totally impressive as Lawrence's 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' or Joyce's 'The Dead', but she has produced the most consistent and extensive body of work in this form by any author writing in English…. Yet she has never been fully assimilated to the canon of modern English literature, and this failure of judgment on the critics' part is intimately connected with her mastery of the short story form.

The short story is allegedly un-English, a foreign mode indebted to Maupassant and Chekhov, excessively worked upon by Americans and Irish. (p. 19)

The ultimate and lasting impression which this entirely welcome collection will create is of Elizabeth Bowen's supremacy in responding to the civilian dimension of the second world war…. [Such] wartime stories as 'The Happpy Autumn Fields' are faultless embodiments of concentrated perception and intelligence…. The war provided her with the circumstances...