[In the following review of Windswept, Jones praises the nobility of Chase's descriptions of a high-minded New England family but finds the writing a little too genteel.]

A reviewer who speaks of “novels of character,” “novels of atmosphere,” “novels of action,” is undoubtedly dated. For most current novelists, apparently preferring to avoid the suspicion of any single intent, refuse to admit the need for any single-minded technical procedure. Miss Chase fortunately can afford a little labeling. Openly inviting the description of her newest book [Windswept] as a “novel of place,” she directs all her literary skill toward giving that aim validity. As in her other works, the scene is again Maine, this time on that bleak, yet compelling coast which is admittedly not a land for the gregarious, but which allows life to find its way unhurried and unbullied.

Philip Marston first recognized the quality of the place, but his accidental death left to his son John the congenial task of realizing its promise. The solidity of sound, simple taste gave it foundation. The honest workmanship of Caleb Perkins, a local man of pithy words and cleancut sawing, built the house to stand, and young John's sturdy instinct for the appropriate kept its wide, gracious rooms free of heirlooms, the whatnots and grape-laden sofas that had cluttered up his father's town house. In the course of Miss Chase's easy-gaited chronicle three generations of Marstons, and “Windswept,” grew organically together. They could take in their stride and relish, each for its special value, the stranger, the foreigner, the unspoiled native, the orphan, the hungry and restless mind, the different views of God. They could do so because the tone was set in the beginning for them by Philip Marston when, looking over the treeless landscape, he reflected that nothing mean must happen here.

Windswept thus becomes a symbol of the kind of life America at its wisest and best can produce—a tolerant, kind, broad, humorous, humane, strong, humble—in short—a civilized life. Everyone in the book is likable, decent, sound. The Bohemians especially, to whom the author gives ample space, reveal not merely their own robust gift for life, but Miss Chase's profound belief in the “foreigner's” enrichment of American life. The Marstons themselves face suffering, separation, war, and death, but never once do they yield to the irrelevant, or falter in their sure conception of their role, their positive attitude toward living.

What happens to this household is told without haste or frenzy. There is plenty of time—time to relish a good Maine anecdote or two, a Bohemian folk-tale or bit of autobiography, an exchange of witty letters between the mildly Chaucerian Mother Radegund and the scholar-squire John Marston. There is time to feel the sharp swish of Maine wind, the delight in the color of the blueberry bush touched by frost, or the rich red abundance of cranberries at picking season.

Where there is so much to admire, it is perhaps unkind to complain that Miss Chase has somehow stopped short of a major achievement. High-mindedness and serene acceptance of what comes result in a kind of monotone of gentility. Ugliness slides too easily out of sight. Too much of the drama inherent in any family saga takes place offstage. You long for clash, for rebellion, for downright human cussedness. You come away very proud to have dined among the angels, yet with the teasing, perhaps ignoble wish that a thoroughly nasty little imp had sat next to you at table.