Miss Elizabeth Jane Howard's first novel, "The Beautiful Visit," is a lively, wistful, romance-saturated autobiography of a young English girl from the day she encounters a strange boy flying his kite in Kensington Gardens and carries him triumphantly home to tea, on through the tempestuous years of her adolescence….

Miss Howard writes her novel with a brilliant ease that is impressive. Her more matter-of-fact passages have a salty adroitness….

Throughout most of the novel, however, Miss Howard needs—and uses—a more tenuous and subtle style to convey the texture and flavor of a girl's romantic experiences. Occasionally she goes off the deep end into passages that are tortuous or even downright silly. And her horror story of the maiden, the eccentric old woman and the parrot lacks, understandably, the mastery of a "Wuthering Heights" or a "Fall of the House of Usher." Taken as a whole the...