If a 19th-century paternity exists for [A Villa in France], it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that beguiling property—so eminently characteristic of Meredith—of seeming to slide more or less uncontrollably between epochs. This is partly because the characters themselves seem to be based as much on well-known fictional prototypes as on anything specific to period and place: the Rev. Henry Rich is described on the first page as coming 'straight out of Mansfield Park', and it is a matter for debate whether he succeeds in emerging from that rarefied world. It is partly because Henry Rich's obsession with Time—which at one point he characterises as moving in our imaginations from left to right, like the reading of a book—spills over into the construction of the narrative. Events that might have been supposed to be important, like the deaths of two principal characters, are relegated to a dismissively subordinate position….

The fact that J.I.M. Stewart is also the detective writer Michael Innes leads me to think that a clue may be lurking around these uncompromising demises. An innocent question is asked at the mid-way stage of the novel: 'Who wrote a novel called The Amazing Marriage?' Penelope Rich, the heroine, knows her Meredith, and can reply to the question, which has very little relevance to the issues being debated at the time. But the 'amazement' provoked by Fulke Ferneydale's death and legacy (the 'Villa in France' of the title) suggests that what we have in fact been following is an immensely protracted peripeteia, a plot which must be called devious even by Meredith's standards. Penelope must be placed in the deliberately contrived circumstances set up by Fulke Ferneydale's will, in order for her earlier, unsuccessful marriage to be nullified and superseded. When, like Homer's Penelope, she has been rescued from the attentions of the over-assiduous and dishonest suitor placed by Fulke to capture her, she can herself take the initiative in setting matters right. She proposes to, and is accepted by, her rescuer.

It really seems as if Dr Stewart has tried to write something which is as distant as possible from the design of a detective story. Instead of resolving the carefully distributed clues into a satisfactory solution, A Villa in France is full of random indications which both stress its literariness and resist incorporation into the plot. Penelope's eventual triumph is a triumph over plot, since the story of her seduction which Fulke has designed as his sadistic legacy is transformed into the story of her independent proposal of marriage. The feminist assertion (as in Meredith) implies a derangement of the customary strategies of narration. One is left with the puzzling conclusion that this … is a feminist book. (p. 11)