[The title Feet in Chains] will perhaps raise expectations of a struggle with the earth and with the bosses; but these expectations are confounded. When the phrase "feet in chains" occurs in the text, to be sure, it is in the context of a character's infuriated wonderment at his workmates' reluctance to unionize. It is a political matter. But the phrase has wider and deeper critical implications, fulfilled only in the last paragraphs of the book, where Owen, a college-educated son who is gradually merging again with the background he had threatened to escape, is suddenly moved to act again: "that was what was wrong with his people. They were courageous in their capacity to endure pain, but would do nothing to get rid of what caused that pain." This sounds, in isolation, like the standard left-wing cry of 1936 …; but in the context of Miss Roberts's undramatic, elliptical...