SOURCE: A review of The Lady Who Sold Furniture, in Canadian Forum, Vol. 50, November, 1970, p. 311.

In the following essay, Gibson provides a favorable review of The Lady Who Sold Furniture.

A perfectly insane and abject terror … raying … influences fatal to life.

Thus, like his father and brother, Henry James speaks of a horrible, toad-like daemon who represents the cold emptiness behind things, possessions, action and, as the two writers under discussion so brilliantly show, words. One might be careless enough to name the experience “existential,” did we know that such terrors are named (“symptom,” “syndrome,”) only that we may deal with them more comfortably: and with another set of empty words.

To deal with the matter requires a style usually called “clinical.” In Metcalf's and Bailey's books the epithet is exact: both deal with the strangeness, the otherness, of life. Even when the antagonist-hero of Trespasses mocks himself...