Wit at once gentle and penetrating, a style both pleasant and forceful, and the ability to render clearly a variety of complex personal and social situations and to elucidate their meanings—these characteristics mark the work of Brigid Brophy. The six stories of "The Crown Princess" are in a most civilized tradition of English writing; restrained, sometimes muted, they are nevertheless richly perceptive and suggestive of difficult human truths.

One reason for this is that Miss Brophy is able to relate a limited subject to the larger social and moral issues that surround and shape it. Such a story as "Mrs. Mandford's Drawing Room," which deals with the attritions of wartime upon the manners and values of an English county family, is implicit with the massive alterations that overtook all elements of English society during the second world war. The fate of the Mandfords is seen as both individual and typical. At the last, it is Geoffrey Mandford's dogged Englishness that most poignantly reveals a transformed world, for by remaining uncompromisingly the Englishman he once was, he now feels he must willingly give up the foreign wife he once cherished. The absurdity of Geoffrey's position is the key to the new spirit of the times.

"His Wife Survived Him" and "The Financial World" also treat of the subtleties of personal relationships within a wider social context….

Another story of persuasive insight is "Fordie." Miss Brophy examines brilliantly varying aspects of the literary life, the kind of vision that marks a writer's failure or success, financial, moral, and artistic. And it is through the adroit presentation of character and within the framework of a vivid narrative that the theme is mastered.

All of Miss Brophy's work, whatever its theme, has the leaven of humor. The title story is light fare spiced with wit. Perhaps it is with the fanciful, as in "Late Afternoon of a Faun," that Miss Brophy is least successful, but even here there is the compelling charm of ironic comedy.

Though several of these stories are constructed upon a series of contrasts, Miss Brophy achieves a desirable variety within what might seem to be a peculiar limitation of technique. At least, it must be said that the quality of her writing and its substance are such that she has no need of formal ingenuity. She has given us a rewarding volume of first stories.