[Miss Renault's theme in Return to Night] is love: the love between a woman doctor of thirty-four, bruised by an unhappy affair with a hospital colleague, and a much younger man whose will has been destroyed and his ambition crushed by the gentle domination of his mother. The story is well, though somewhat lengthily, told, and Miss Renault succeeds in engaging one's sympathy for her characters. The novel's construction shows, however, several faults of method. First, attention is concentrated upon the two principal characters throughout, when in so leisurely a novel one requires either a greater expansiveness … or, alternatively, a much more emphatic, intense and economical concentration upon the central issue. Secondly, there is a certain distortion through the employment of the third person method of narration, when in fact everything is presented from Hilary's—the doctor's—viewpoint. As a result of this one is able to see...