Elizabeth Jane Howard seems to belong, by nature as well as by profession, among those British women writers whose trademark is their exacerbated sensibility. If the dean of these novelists, Virginia Woolf, achieved a collaboration of sense and sensibility as yet unmatched, her successors—most notably Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann—though less raw-nerved and more safely cushioned have the same passion for nuances. This peculiarly feminine contribution to the modern novel is the yardstick by which Elizabeth Jane Howard should be measured.

There are four major characters in Miss Howard's [The Sea Change], not one of whom, on the surface, could escape the charge of stereotype…. At first glance these figures are so recognizable that the reader is tempted to believe that he knows about them all there will ever be to know. But it is a mistake to draw this conclusion. Long before the novel ends...