A Mixture of Frailties is Davies's third novel. The story of Mrs. Bridgetower's bequest provides the frame for Monica Gall's story, which is a Kunstlerroman, a novel about the development of an artist. A number of characters, most notably Solomon and Veronica Bridgetower, play relatively small roles in the story of Monica Gall, but Davies depends on the reader's familiarity with and interest in these characters from the two earlier Salterton novels. Thus, they have the weight of major characters even though they appear only briefly in the novel. It would be an irrelevancy for a reader to learn that Monica Gall becomes good friends with the Bridgetowers if the reader were not already familiar with them and had a greater sense of their humanity than he gains in A Mixture of Frailties.

Davies's characterizations are in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century English novelists. Minor figures are...