[The Lilywhite Boys] is ambitious and at times brilliantly written; but somehow the family in the country house with do-gooding wife, gnomic cook, strange secretary and neglected sons, who make a religion of their mother, are unconvincing and don't tease the curiosity. Such very special cases need to be presented to the reader cunningly, so that they seem as important and interesting to him as to their creator. Being introduced to wonderful friends of friends and remaining quite unmoved is an unavoidable experience in life but it has no place in literature. Perhaps part of the trouble is that a short story theme is scaled up to a shortish novel. The book's real distinction in detached phrases, sentences and even paragraphs isn't enough to carry the central conception of the novel.

There is a certain kind of well endowed, energetic woman who spends her days doing good unto others….

Mrs. Dilly, the central figure of Josephine Poole's perceptive novel The Lilywhite Boys, is the epitome of such gifted, busy women….

[The] point about Mrs. Dilly and the problem of the novel is that people who spread light and happiness far afield may not always succeed in their closest and most important relationships and responsibilities.

Mrs. Dilly's genial, somewhat effete husband, Clarence, feels … left out of his wife's field of concern because he isn't an unmarried mother or a truancy case…. And her sons …, the lily white boys of the title—elevate their marvellous, untouchable mother to the status of a goddess. Mrs. Dilly is admirable, she is good, she is charming, but she sucks her nearest dry.

This Mrs. Dilly is a superbly real, dominant creation, matched in accuracy of portrayal by Anna, the well-meaning amanuensis who begins to perceive what is happening to the neglected children. The bucolic supporting staff are right, too, even if names like Mrs. Joybells make their point a little obviously. It is even possible to accept the fey boys whose intense yearnings and almost Jamesian cunning fit naturally in the heavy atmosphere of a hot, expectant country summer. The feel of the writing is stylized—the Dilly household speak with a directness and precision reminiscent of one of Ivy Compton-Burnett's—and the country setting is so rural as to seem prewar. In their context these features are appropriate and create the quite remarkable, sinister yet credible mood of this promising novel.

Catch as Catch Can by Josephine Poole is [a] remarkable book where the exact nature of the thing which lifts it above the ordinary is not easy to define. The plot is simple enough…. [There is a] subtle build-up of tension to a pitch of sustained menace where melodrama seems the natural outcome. The book is full of unexpected adjectives—"a wide black cat"—and odd, quirky, throw-away lines like the one about the grandfather clock "that would not go unless it was kept twenty minutes fast". (How did it know it was twenty minutes fast, for heaven's sake? Surely they could fool it somehow?)