[In the following assessment of The Gentle Insurrection, Eaton describes the collection as “twelve fine stories, free from banality of thought and commonplace theme, exploring deep dimensions of experience with a mature authority.”]

It is often interesting, sometimes moving, and once in too great a while unexpectedly and satisfactorily exciting, to read the first published work of a new “serious” young writer, using the French word sérieux, which does not preclude comedy, but is simply the word of tribute that nation of individual critics and craftsmen chooses to give to the man or woman presenting a well-finished, properly polished piece of work to an equally “serious” public. Doris Betts's The Gentle Insurrection is such an occasion for excitement.

Here we have twelve fine stories, free from banality of thought and commonplace theme, exploring deep dimensions of experience with a mature authority. Mrs. Betts excels in the creation of charged atmospheres, subtle tensions, and unexpressed anxieties between well-meaning people who would like to understand one another, but are hopelessly divided by our human isolation.

Her work passes one of the tests of the greatest writing, which is that more shall assail the reader than is written on the page. Her first story, “The Sympathetic Visitor,” is an example of power of evocation and communication of a mood every white woman living in the South will recognize, here superbly and economically conveyed. The tragedy of Nettie Sue, whose brother, driven desperate by the pressures of drab life, and by the war, to murder his mother and run amok through a terrorized town, is matched by the tragedy of Miss Ward, who, accepting and resenting guilty responsibility, can find only platitudes to say to Nettie Sue. “‘Yes,’ said Miss Ward. Now the tiredness was all over her, hanging on her limbs the way moss hangs on trees in a swamp; she felt herself slumping, flattening. ‘Yes, we were all scared uptown, too’.”

“Child So Fair” is another example of Mrs. Betts's strong, sensitive power of evocation. We enter fully into several lives in a short eight pages: “Will Franklin took Thea to wife when she was about sixteen, and they fell to displeasure right away. Thea didn't hold with forgiving too ready and Will didn't care if she did or neither, so it went poorly for them. Thea was the only one of them all ever coming home; the rest stuck it out in quietness.”

The weakest story in the book is the most ambitious, “Serpents and Doves,” an excursion into Stephen Vincent Benét's world of dialogue with the devil, which doesn't quite come off, though it has its good moments before we encounter the devil.

“The Gentle Insurrection,” from which the collection takes its title, was printed in Coraddi, at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina, as was “The Sword”; “The Sympathetic Visitor” and “Mr. Shawn and Father Scott” won prizes and publication in Mademoiselle. The collection received the $2,000 award in the first Putnam-University of North Carolina Prize contest. After such a promising debut in the world of letters, it will be interesting to watch the development of this writer's work. What, for instance, will she give us, when she has emerged from the generous pessimism of indignant youth, and, in the words of Dr. Johnson's would-be philosopher, “cheerfulness breaks in”? It could be a great book.