["North Face"] has moments when one feels that one is witnessing love in its tenderest and purest form—how old-fashioned those adjectives are!—and at the same time it is treated in a rigorously analytical manner. Never does the name do service for the thing. It is marvelous that Miss Renault's analysis does not destroy its subject, but it does not.

Of course, there are other moments, when the author seems to be too much concerned with more hackneyed psychological effects. But that is understandable. It would be very difficult to portray a love affair between two simple people. Miss Renault finds it simpler to set her love affair between two people who are in deep psychological difficulties….

The course of [the love affair of Neil and Ellen] by which two problems are surmounted that singly had defeated them, is compared, by an unobtrusive but effective analogy, to a difficult climb. In this emotional ascent, as Miss Renault recounts it, there are moments which are as breath-less and as breathtaking to behold as there could be in the ascent of the most refractory alp.

The minor characters—there are very few of them—are all superbly done….

Thus it is that "North Face" is not only a moving book but a reassuring one. These people … are so very real, not merely so believable but so believed, that it is impossible not to believe also that, after all, romantic love is a genuine emotion.