Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson is a very cool and intelligent writer, and if she always promises a little more than she performs, her performance is still well out of the range of most novelists. She writes very carefully, building up a character with small, ingenious strokes; her observation of social and intellectual nuances is acute; yet in the end much of her work is softened by an emotionalism which blurs the outlines of character and weakens the story.

The Last Resort [published in the United States as The Sea and the Wedding] is about a well-to-do girl who is rejected by her lover after the death of his invalid wife, and marries a homosexual in the desperate need to obtain at least a new name and an unseparate life. All the minor figures in the story are wonderfully well done—the heroine's rude old father and leech-like mother...