["After Julius"] is Elizabeth Jane Howard's fourth novel—time to ask where one of England's most talented writers is going. Miss Howard has been called "promising" so often the word must make her shudder. She has also been pinned as a "lady novelist"—fit companion for such quivering stylists as Rosamond Lehmann.

I suspect Miss Howard does not accept this description of herself…. Is Miss Howard tired of being hailed for her exquisite sensibility? Does she want us to notice that she also has quite a bit of sense in her books?

At bottom, all the characters in "After Julius" are working out a dilemma that has muddled middle-class lives in England and America for generations—how the do-good tradition of loving "humanity" in the large permits people (especially men) to fink out on loving people individually. Women, of course, are the inevitable victims of this masculine malaise...