Humor and Pathos and Understanding
Amounting to rather more than a random collection of short pieces, "Cress Delahanty" has almost the continuity of a novel….
Most of the episodes, slight in themselves, are in the vein of wry compassionate comedy….
Jessamyn West … is a serious writer and a realist, and some of her stories are more sombre, some a good deal more powerful….
[When Cress falls in love for the first time,] the author's extraordinary skill, insight, and accuracy of touch are given full play. What might have been grotesque or embarrassing is in fact genuinely moving: Mr. Cornelius and his wife are fine people, and teach Cress a good deal about the nature of love, about human devotion.
It is perhaps inevitable that a book written piecemeal, over a long period, should be uneven. Here and there comedy broadens into farce, or a point seems labored, or a faint implausibility steals in. This reviewer wishes the opening episode, a kind of prelude, had been omitted—out of key and technically too elaborate, it gets things off to a wobbling start. And the ambitious story of Cress and Mrs. Charlesbots, one more fascinating, lost lady, seems a little hackneyed for all the skill of its telling.
But these are captious criticisms of so wise and diverting a book. Miss West possesses a refreshing sanity, an essential earthiness, a robust sense of humor; and because she is a born writer, and a good one, she illuminates even the most commonplace material with her own particular magic. Although it seems less original than "The Friendly Persuasion" and necessarily slight compared with "The Witch Diggers," "Cress Delahanty" should delight all Jessamyn West's old admirers and win her a great many new ones.
Dan Wickenden, "Humor and Pathos and Understanding," in New York Herald Tribune Book Review (© I.H.T. Corporation; reprinted by permission), Vol. 30, No. 21, January 3, 1954, p. 3.
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