[In the following review, Wyndham praise Brophy's achievement in The King of a Rainy Country.]

A great deal of fuss is made nowadays about books by young writers and there is certainly no lack of these; young books, however, are more rare, books, that is, in which the quality of youth is a positive feature instead of being an excuse for inexperience or impressively disguised by a precocious maturity. Brigid Brophy is a young writer (under thirty) who has written a young book about young people: in The King of a Rainy Country she strikes exactly the right note, conveying the gaiety, absurdity and pathos of youth without whimsy, complacency or self-pity. She is witty and observant and has produced, it seems to me, a model light novel. Her ghastly hero, her ruefully romantic heroine, the squalor of their London life, the hilarious account of their career as guides to a coach-load of American tourists in Europe, the culmination of their ridiculous quest at a film festival in Venice, are treated with high-spirited assurance: and when the fantasy of their emotional lives is splintered by a tentative contact with reality, an aching sadness is introduced which the author handles with unsuspected subtlety. This is, in fact, 'more' than the light novel it initially appears to be, but Miss Brophy achieves her serious intention with no sacrifice of readability, economy of style or funniness and although she has written a modern picaresque she shows no trace of the portentousness and implied aggression that this form now suggests.