Quite possibly a portent of stiffening literary morality, this excellent novel ["The Humbler Creation"] reverses two of the major trends of good modern fiction. It shows almost none of the frank subjectivity, the recognition of imaginative limitations that so frequently make the modern novelist more interesting than his characters. It also breaks sharply with the bohemian attitudes of those writers who seem to secede from their society in a way that Pamela Hansford Johnson … most clearly does not….

Miss Johnson writes so well in a traditional vein (one obvious ancestor is Trollope) and at the same time shows such an intimate realistic grasp of modern minutiae that she suggests a comparison, if only for purposes of historical elucidation, with the British woman novelist generally regarded as the best of our times, Virginia Woolf. Miss Johnson justifies the comparison, not because she possesses anything like Mrs. Woolf's verbal magic...