Eilís Dillon is an experienced novelist, so it is not surprising that her wide range of characters should all be fully drawn—the adults as well as the children…. [She succeeds] in communicating a real sense of setting and atmosphere and [her] characters … are real people acting from believable motives. If the traditional adventure story has any future this is how it should be written. (p. 97)

Across the Bitter Sea, Eilis Dillon's 571-page panorama of Irish life from 1851 to Easter 1916 is a mixture of political testament and comedy of manners. The movement between domestic interiors and crowd scenes, between personal tragedies and the public events of nineteenth-century Ireland and after, forms the groundswell for the book and makes up for some gaucheness in the handling of the passage of time and the evolution of politics and personalities. The gaucheness comes from Miss Dillon's evident attempt to break away from too firm an historical perspective, an author's-eye view of events, and to replace this with a more immediate sense of what such things as the evictions of tenants, the murder of landlords, the Fenian conspiracies and the fall of Parnell, seemed like to ordinary Irish people. This means that the reader often has to pick up dates by inference and to rely on his own knowledge of the period to decide whether characters are historical or fictional. There are moments, even in a book as well researched and deeply lived as this one, when the reader would have appreciated stronger direction by the author, an occasional helping hand….

On the Irish or Anglo-Irish caste system and the subtle gradations created by religious intolerance and British colonialism, Miss Dillon writes with a novelist's insight and relish.

What gives Across the Bitter Sea its distinction is Miss Dillon's deep sympathy with her own people and their sufferings. She comes from a family of politicians and has the Irish capacity for making yesterday's wrongs as alive as today's. Certain dates in Irish history, Easter 1916 for example, are still, as it were, happening in her soul; and probably will go on happening. She is also an Irish scholar and so, feeling the people's thoughts from within, has been able to keep her language free of corny Irishisms.

Just occasionally, as in a prayer for the exiles forced to sail to America, does the English carry something of the rich gravity of the original Irish. Throughout the novel the reader is never allowed to forget that an ancient culture is being destroyed by poverty, brutal re-education and persecution of such viciousness that people on this side of the "bitter sea" almost lack a vocabulary to respond adequately to a retelling of it.