Christopher Fry was the first dramatist after the war to bring to the English theatre not merely a national, but also an international, fame. It is difficult to exaggerate the sense of freshness and excitement that swept through the theatrical world when The Lady's Not for Burning, with the extraordinary brilliance of the fancies, the conceits, and the imagination of its dialogue, the originality of its verse-form, and the joyous mediaeval paradox of its story seemed to shatter the by then somnolent reign of naturalism on the British stage. (p. 13)

[Can You Find Me] is a book of unique character. It is the autobiography of an outstanding international dramatist of our time, who has achieved some of the most notable successes, and been played by some of the most famous actors and actresses of the age. Yet no mention is made of these things in Can You Find Me. They could, it is true, hardly be discussed at length, for the book finishes when the author reaches the age of eleven. But there is not even the slightest premonition of them, no suggestion of the things to come. From the perfect form and completeness of the book I should guess that Mr. Fry does not intend to give it a sequel. It is one: indivisible and unadditionable. Not only is there no reference in it to, for example, Venus Observed, or The Boy with a Cart, but it scarcely ever mentions the theatre at all….

It is a book that is full of echoes rather than of foreshadowings: a series of minor events that happened to small people out of which there slowly emerges a pattern of life magically surrounded with a sense of mystery and even of awe. Mr. Fry is a great hand at jigsaw puzzles…. As each piece in a jigsaw is of little or no importance in itself yet combines with its fellows to present a total work of art, so out of a multitude of tiny incidents, trivial hopes, and unmomentous disappointments, which are rescued by Mr. Fry with the help of a few old letters and diary entries of the baldest kind, out of what one would have thought an impenetrable past, there is created a feeling about life, about its strangeness, and its inexplicability that is poetic in its sensibility, and poignant in a gentle and all-pervading sadness…. [Can You Find Me is] subtle in its inspiration, and in the quietness of its establishment of a universal melancholy; and since our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought it is the most beautiful, and in the end the most haunting.

Does anything of the past, as revealed in these unobtrusively masterly pages, live on in Christopher Fry? Is he what he is because his parents and his grandparents, his aunts and his cousins are what they were? He asks this question wistfully, but he does not answer it in set terms; it is left to the understanding and sympathetic reader to judge for himself. The question is present in our minds all the time we are reading his book, and it remains to tease us long after we have put it down…. Basically Mr. Fry's book is the evocation of a troubled and bewildered suburban and rural family flanked by wild adventures at opposite ends of the globe. (p. 14)

Can You Find Me demonstrates Fry's instinctive searching for another world than that in which we live: for a world that is perhaps not wholly comprehensible to ordinary human reason, but which is free from sordidness and restlessness and baseness and insecurity. He has discovered in this remarkable work that such a world is not to be found in the past, at least not in the past of his own family, in spite of its aspirations, its many gifts, and its fatal weaknesses; and it is this perhaps that has made him in the theatre an inhabitant of a glittering romance founded ultimately on a sense of deep religious faith and commitment. (p. 17)