SOURCE: “Unfailing Insight,” in Commonweal, September 28, 1979, pp. 539-40.

In the following review, Scott compares Trilling's Reviewing the Forties with Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader for its “quiet pleasure.”

If one is of a sufficient age, to read the pieces that Diana Trilling has collected in Reviewing the Forties from her work as chief fiction reviewer for The Nation in the 1940s is to feel a certain nostalgic longing for that marvelous period of the journal's career when, under Freda Kirchwey's editorship, Clement Greenberg and James Agee, B. H. Haggin and Reinhold Niebuhr and Harold Laski, as its regular contributors, were giving it an authority approached by no other weekly of the time. And, amongst these figures, Mrs. Trilling earned an important place by virtue of the wit and intelligence and courtesy with which she scrutinized and evaluated the current fiction that came across her desk week after week...