SOURCE: “Female Economy,” in New Statesman, Vol. 93, No. 2404, April 15, 1977, p. 498.

In the following positive review, Cunningham compliments Johnston's skilled prose in Shadows on Our Skin.

More long-distance relations and soppy-minded well-wishers are poised maieutically about Jane Austen's unfinished The Watsons than medieval angelologists might decently have risked covening on the head of one of their theological pins. A. N. Other, assisted by a couple of great-great-great nieces, re-doing (the second re-do; the first was by the niece's grand-daughter) niece Catherine Austen's novel of 1850, putatively based on knowledge of what The Watsons was to have been, allegedly gleaned from Jane's sister Cassandra and Catherine's step-mother (Jane's friend) Martha: why must the pin-heads shore their ruins about a great writer's fragments? It's quite a different story when, say, Kafka has actually written all the bits Max Brod sorts out, or when Wives and Daughters is left with only a couple...