The publication of Miss E. M. Delafield's latest novel, Thank Heaven Fasting, affords a welcome pretext briefly to review a range of achievements placing this author among the most accomplished fiction-writers of our time. Although the present survey is necessarily confined to aspects of Miss Delafield's art as revealed through her novels, readers will recall for themselves the exceptional talent illuminating numerous short stories from her pen, no less than dramatic capabilities ensuring unqualified success for that delightful comedy, To See Ourselves, produced at the Ambassadors Theatre in December, 1929.

When Zella Sees Herself appeared in 1917, Miss Delafield was immediately acclaimed for those powers of witty and devastating portraiture with which to-day she is extensively associated. It is a misfortune, perhaps, that critics have too often expected her to preserve a similar vein throughout the score of novels written since that date. As a satirist Miss Delafield has eminent gifts, but she may be credited, on the evidence of more recent volumes, with the increasing realisation that among aspects of life meriting discussion, some, at any rate, scarcely invite treatment in satirical terms. She is, for that matter, too fine an artist to acquiesce in infinite repetition of an early success. To dissuade admirers from their irrational clamour for an endless sequence of novels designed simply to reproduce, with slight variations, the entertainment of Zella, must have been a delicate task; yet Miss Delafield, while submitting her style and subject-matter to stricter discipline, has contrived not only to retain but vastly to enlarge her public.

Zella, The War-Workers and, to some extent, The Pelicans are all illustrative of experiences common to those whose instinct for self-dramatisation, or insincere conformity to type, outruns not only discretion but intellectual honesty. Selecting theses so various as conversion to Roman Catholicism and the exploitation of feminine tendencies to revere personalities above abstract values, Miss Delafield postulates "What is Truth?" as a question to be answered in the light of disasters and exposures inseparable from attempts to shirk this vital (if not always agreeable) issue. She never falsifies conclusions to secure the dubious advantage of a "happy ending," but neither are we vexed with those totally negative findings which can banish so successfully every vestige of interest from the problem discussed. Her most derided characters are, as a rule, less bad than sorely exercised in consistent preservation of their self-appointed pose. Miss Delafield knows them sufficiently to admit cool pity for such foolishness even while stripping, with consummate skill, the masks which they struggle so vainly to retain.

If the caustic ridicule enlivening many pages in these and other early novels seems on occasion too carefully underlined, the apposite nature of Miss Delafield's shrewd commentaries upon human frailties invites little dispute. Her characters, as we are constantly reminded, often represent types to be scarified but, with few exceptions, the author further persuades us to their existence as living people. The reality of Mrs. Lloyd-Evans in Zells, of Charmian Vivian in The War-Workers and Nina Severing in The Pelicans remains with us long after the book is closed. There may be at times excessive anxiety to reinforce dialogue by emphasis upon satirical implications quite evident to the reader; yet Miss Delafield's insight can reach beyond scorn to accurately placed sympathy, and at the great moments her touch is unerring.

Few writers surpass her ability to strike in a sentence the key-note of minor characters. One example, from The Pelicans, must suffice:

Miss Blandflower belonged to that numerous and mistaken class of person which supposes the art of witty conversation to lie in the frequent quotation of well-known tags, and the humorously-intended mispronunciation of the more ordinary words of the English language.

If disproportionate space seems to have been given to discussion of the novels so far mentioned, it is because they epitomise the technical and philosophical address dominating their immediate successors. Consequences deals with the perplexities of a Roman Catholic convert who becomes a nun, but renounces her vows after ten years, to meet, in a strangely altered world, bewilderment finally driving her to suicide. Neither this volume nor, one must add, Tension and The Heel of Achilles show quite the expected advance upon Miss Delafield's brilliant apprenticeship, though Humbug and The Optimist, each exhibiting the inescapable penalty for an existence ruled by false values, suggest more keenly the intellectual expansion germane to maturer craftsmanship. In Messalins of the Suburbs Miss Delafield departs, with conspicuous success, from her accustomed genre, to present a psychological analysis of events culminating in a murder akin to that for which Bywaters and Mrs. Thompson were arraigned. The study is vividly worked out, with finely captured atmosphere and an astonishing perception of motives animating the primary characters of this tragedy.

The close of a period, anticipated by The Chip and the Block, is confirmed in The Way Things Are. Throughout nearly a dozen novels Miss Delafield had wittily exploited, often with success and always with variety, the limitless manifestations of human nature governed by egotism and unheroic self-deception. The Chip and the Block portrays with refreshing irony an author whose uncommon power to misinterpret his innate selfishness and unjustified conceit as subscriptions to a lofty ideal of self-sacrificing parenthood are at first dimly realised, and at the last eminently unshared, by his clearer-sighted children. The Way Things Are, more abundant in lighter moments, centers round a woman whose agonised incompetence as a housewife is equalled only by her distraught refusal of opportunity to escape from a husband in whose affections she has long been supplanted by the morning newspaper. Both novels are strong in characteristic touches; but one can sense the author's sharpened ambition for less charted seas; and the departure when it occurs comes suddenly.

Turn Back the Leaves suggests at first reading a complete metamorphosis. We find in these pages a new serenity of style; suppression of emphasis and incidental commentary; and qualities of permanent dignity enhancing portraiture memorable, in any event, for fine perspective and sympathetic vision. True it is that the crucial motif— the despair of an old Roman Catholic family at the marriage of their daughter to a Protestant—echoes to some extent the preoccupation of earlier novels; but beyond this point similarity cannot be pressed. The dominant tragedy of Miss Delafield's theme demands that humour, though allowable at moments of relief, shall be strictly disciplined. Here ridicule has no place. Such unaccustomed control has caused one or two critics, looking for wit where none is intended, to speak of this book as "disappointing." Yet to accept Miss Delafield on the terms she proposes—the only terms artistically tolerable for her subject—is to appreciate how immeasurably she has advanced upon her former standards by an achievement of exceptional notability.

Turn Back the Leaves marks a supreme crisis in Miss Delafield's career, establishing her, beyond possible doubt, high among contemporary novelists. She has since proved an ability to enjoy conquests in both her accepted worlds. Challenge to Clarissa maintains, in comedy, all the new distinction. The Diary of a Provincial Lady is memorable for masterly entertainment too widely known to need comment here … Concerning Thank Heaven Fasting, I must not usurp the reviewer's prerogative beyond submitting that, in my own opinion, it enriches yet further the deserved reputation of this distinguished novelist.