[J.I.M. Stewart] has written, in A Villa in France, an eminently readable, amusing and vacuous novel. A pastiche on the styles and preoccupations of Trollope, Proust and—above all—Jane Austen, it has for its heroine a parson's daughter who, while a schoolgirl, refuses the hand of a dissolute, playwright neighbour; later to marry his tedious brother—an impoverished Catholic academic. Whether intentionally or otherwise, the plot pretty soon deteriorates into something closer to Mary Stewart than Austen—with mysterious wills, and strange young men lurking in foreign villas—while the disappointing denouement shows signs of authorial laziness, or boredom, or both. But then, as Stewart says in passing, when 'reviewed in batches by acrid women' what chance does a novel stand?