SOURCE: "Marseille Ramble," The New York Times Book Review, June 4, 1978, p. 10.

Morris is an English journalist, travel writer, and autobiographer. In the following review, she extols A Considerable Town as an exceptionally perceptive portrait of the French city of Marseille.

Most city essays are awful—I have written some really ghastly ones—and most city books are worse still. Is there any literary product more depressing than your archetypal urban travelogue, with its statutory folios of lush photography interspersed among the obligatory historical gobbets and hashed-up anecdotes?

It is a delight, then, to welcome another distinctly un-city book from dear M. F. K. Fisher—"dear" because Mrs. Fisher stands to so many of us, wherever we live, in the office of an endlessly entertaining and slightly mysterious aunt. She has written one such book before, about Aix-la-Chapelle, but in A Considerable Town she develops the genre much...