[In the excerpt below, Ingoldby describes the characters from Good Night Sweet Ladies as well-developed and the story as funny, but suggests that Blackwood does not develop conflict within the stories sufficiently.]

Caroline Blackwood's characters are a neatly observed group of humans, vain, selfish and self-deluding, who peep at the truth about themselves and then quietly, quickly, close the door. They are great betrayers of themselves, their animals and each other, and stylish inventors of strategies which just enable them to circumnavigate the truth. Taft, the social worker, protects himself from intimacy ('as a lover he merely obliged') by the invention of the tragic loss of his wife, which always gets him out of a hole; Mrs Burton can persuade herself that a dinner appointment is more important than a dying dog. Such strategies invite prodigious guilt which in several instances is quite enough to put the characters off their food. Mrs Burton cannot even face her soup, which appears as a dangerous lake into which she must dive to save her croutons. She doesn't dive but watches hopelessly as the last sinking square of bread appears first as her mother (waving?) and then as her dying dog. Good Night Sweet Ladies is very funny and the writing, as always, is stylish and close to the bone, but there is a sense in this collection that perhaps this time she might have gone just a little further than she has. Her vision is, one suspects, blacker than she is yet prepared to admit—almost as if Saul, having seen the light on the road to Damascus, decided, disappointingly, to keep it to himself.