New England is traditionally the home place of the American humanists, the American conscience troubled by its appetites, heckled by its morality, crucified by its intelligence. Its stern Puritan fathers have never successfully concealed the essential physical yearnings and the lusts which made begetting patriarchs of them and scandalous males, even as they erected their picket fences of respectable morality and visited Old Testament wrath upon unconventional sinners, witches and adulterers….

[Rarely] has the conflict been so dramatically presented in terms of historical fiction as it is in Esther Forbes's novel of the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, "Paradise." An accomplished artist in psychological fiction dealing with the eccentrics, witches, fanatics, romancers and other types characteristic of New England communities, Miss Forbes is an excellent historian as well, a student of detail of the type which has made Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" historically unassailable...