[In the following review, Cosman praises the controlled sentiment of The Light in the Piazza.]

If Elizabeth Spencer needs any proof of her right to the praise former efforts like Fire in the Morning and A Voice at the Back Door have gained her, she has it in The Light in the Piazza. Though this latest offering is hardly more than a novelette, it is still a notable piece of work.

What strikes one first is its delicate perception of emotion. A quality of this sort is perhaps to be expected. What is not, and is therefore the more gratifying, is the book's control of sentiment. There is never a slopping over into sentimentality.

Not surprisingly, then, a similar consistency prevails in other respects. Everything is ordered. The end, for example, is implicit in the beginning, and the details in between, significantly selected, add up to something that makes constant sense.

Fullness of implication and narrative flow, however, are not all there is to The Light in the Piazza. It has a very contemporary theme: the interaction of differing nationals. In mediating between these, rather than in defending the one at the expense of the other, it not only meets the test of present thought on the matter, it actually gives fresh treatment to its Jamesian problem.

Signor Naccarelli is Miss Spencer's representative Italian. As she presents him, he is logical, mannered, capable of the devious, and as a true bourgeois, sensitive to the main chance. Mrs. Johnson, in turn, is no less characteristically American. Civic leader and hostess of Winston-Salem, she is efficient but feminine, forthright by choice, but when compelled, quite capable of wielding whatever power she has.

She is soon compelled to wield every last bit of it, for she is a mother with a dream, namely, to see her daughter Clara lead a normal life. But the poor thing is not normal. When she was ten, she was kicked in the head by her pony, and this was the dire result: her intellect became fixed at precisely what it was at the time of the accident. Had her body remained in harmony thereafter, all might have been well, relatively speaking. Unfortunately, it did not; it continued to mature normally.

Now a traveler and in Florence, she is a child-woman of twenty-six in love with Fabrizio, Signor Naccarelli's son. It is part of the irony of the situation that her imbalance doesn't militate against her either with Fabrizio who returns her love or with his friends who are no great intellects either.

So far as can be judged, her innocence and beauty assure her of the consideration she immediately needs. And her dowry of fifteen thousand dollars, a striking one in the eyes of the society about her, seems a sure guarantee of her future. Certainly, at the moment, it is winning over Signor Naccarelli to such adjustment as he has to make to chronology. (Despite the impression of youth she gives, Clara is three years older than Fabrizio.)

All that has to be done is to consummate the dream. And consummate it Mrs. Johnson does, though much is exacted from her. To start with, she has to circumvent her husband whose intransigence is something to reckon with. Simultaneously she has to compound with her conscience, though she does try on one or two occasions to tell the Naccarellis the whole truth.

But the most urgent payment she has to make is to part with her daughter. That agony—here we are back not only to Henry James but to E. M. Forster and others who have made contributions to the literature of international relationships—is exacerbated by the doubts that persist in her at the sight of social and religious mores different from her own.

Finally, of course, the deed is done. The ceremony over, the happy couple go off to the bliss which is theirs by virtue of affection and parental maneuver. In the vacuum left by the departure Mrs. Johnson notes some tourists trying to take the sort of picture tourists usually take. They are hampered by the day's brilliance.

Suddenly the memory of an accident comes back to her. Again she sees one who was hurt struggling to get up, while near him, silent in bronze, in the calm repose of triumph, stands Cellini's statue of Perseus holding aloft the Medusa's head.

The tableau is not inadvertent. In its several elements our author is obviously giving those last symbolic touches called for by her parable of a human being conquering dread limitations in the fierce glare of nature.