SOURCE: A review of A Garland of Straw, in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 2165, July 31, 1943, p. 365.

The critic offers a mixed assessment of the stories in A Garland of Straw.

There have been several unusually interesting volumes of short stories in recent months. In most of them the stories represented the output of a longer period of time than that following the outbreak of war, so the war itself, while it has for obvious practical reasons given a fillip to the short-story form (and to verse) as a relatively unleisured means of expression, cannot alone account for the frequency of such volumes of late. But the fact is that, in this matter of types and casts of literature as of so much else, war-time conditions have only intensified the state of things before the war. For practising or potential writers of fiction of all sorts, one must assume...