[In the following excerpt, Price asserts that The Light in the Piazza might be more effective as a short story instead of a novella.]

This has been a disappointing week; by that I mean that I have never become excited while reading, never hurried back to a novel, never wanted to push any of the batch under my friends' eyes. I suppose there is an inevitable gap between the reviewer who says “I have read all this before,” and the reader who says “You may have but I haven't. Your job is to read novels; mine isn't.” Of course, the very good or very bad book is easy enough to deal with by reader or reviewer. It is the in-between one that is the difficulty. To say “I didn't think much of it because it seemed hackneyed; but if you don't read very many new novels you might quite enjoy it,” would be insufferably patronizing and conceited and impertinent and unfair to the novelist. Yet it really might be quite helpful. But, on the other hand, standards have to be kept up.

The Light in the Piazza is a chilly little tale about an American mother who marries her mentally defective daughter off to a Florentine. Economically told and not requiring to be explicitly ruthless, it does not really do much beyond straightforwardly recounting the stages in the grim transaction. With some help from layout, what might be a very good short story is stretched to a hundred pages and the publishers are thus able to charge 12s 6d for it. The American reviews of Miss Spencer's previous books make one wonder why it is this one that has been chosen for her English début.