As a gimmick for the culture department of television, how about a studio gathering of the "Elizabeth" novelists—the Misses Bowen, Taylor, Jenkins and Howard? The game would be to attribute selected quotations. Of course, such a confrontation would reveal very considerable distinctions of personality and talent—supposing the participants were likely to agree to such frivolous categorizing. But the thought occurs, not entirely frivolously, after one has checked back from Miss Howard's [Something in Disguise] to make sure that the many echoes of character and situation are not, as it were, generic. The opening scene, of a middle-class family wedding day in the Home Counties, complete with scatty widowed mother and cynical bachelor son, for instance; or the theme of a gauche, schoolgirlish virgin blossoming in the sophisticated hands of a paternal lover; the loneliness of a woman, growing too old for love, gently consoled by a...