Mary Renault is a highly intuitive Englishwoman who writes simple, lyrical prose, and whose portrait of the mental digressions of her characters in the course of a love affair can be as relentless as if she were following the trail of a hunted fox….

["North Face"] is as English to the core as the wooded and mountainous North Devon country in which the story is shrouded, so much so that it is difficult for an American reader to become interested at first in the inhabitants of the seaside guest house where Neil Langton goes to reflect on his ravished past. (p. 11)

As characters, both the forthright nurse and the woman teacher, who hides from her mind the grosser aspects of life, are as fully drawn as Neil and his Ellen. They are both admirable human beings, in their different ways, and their frustrations, since marriage and sex have...