Quite possibly a portent of stiffening literary morality, this excellent novel ["The Humbler Creation"] reverses two of the major trends of good modern fiction. It shows almost none of the frank subjectivity, the recognition of imaginative limitations that so frequently make the modern novelist more interesting than his characters. It also breaks sharply with the bohemian attitudes of those writers who seem to secede from their society in a way that Pamela Hansford Johnson … most clearly does not….

Miss Johnson writes so well in a traditional vein (one obvious ancestor is Trollope) and at the same time shows such an intimate realistic grasp of modern minutiae that she suggests a comparison, if only for purposes of historical elucidation, with the British woman novelist generally regarded as the best of our times, Virginia Woolf. Miss Johnson justifies the comparison, not because she possesses anything like Mrs. Woolf's verbal magic—she does not, though she writes with masterly precision—but because she goes deeper, knows her people better and faces up more squarely to their problems. If Mrs. Woolf was a Bloomsbury stylist reacting against the crudities of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, Miss Johnson is a post-imperial social scientist reacting against the elegant estheticism of Bloomsbury.

In "The Humbler Creation" she considers the overworked, underpaid, middle-aged, tone-deaf, unimaginative vicar of a London parish who has the misfortune, when his icily handsome wife turns away from him, to fall in love with another woman. He does nothing improper, he only pours out his heart and kisses his beloved on the neck, but the mere existence of his unfulfilled emotion is sufficient reason to haul him before his bishop and threaten his suddenly obstinate passion with general ruin. In this unlikely material, free of any poetry, animal joy or religious ecstasy, Miss Johnson has had the novelistic prescience to see a rare opportunity. While presenting her wretched vicar against a humdrum background of church bazaars, organ practice, family quarrels, well-meaning officials and cheerless sinners, she has cannily dramatized the path of duty that is still for so many dogged, long-suffering Britons the only way to glory. She has created a symbolic portrait of Britain today.

Those of us who have not followed such a narrow path, who imagined such rigors had ended forever with the coming of an economy of abundance and a well-known trend toward ethical relativity, will yet be held by this story. It is no mere anachronism. Beneath each line it asks: "What happens to nations when they lose this despised mechanical morality? And how many individuals can live without it?" The book is a kind of "Pilgrim's Progress" for our times, except that this pilgrim makes no progress, but simply tries to carry on.

The novel is not grandly conceived; it is content to make its tough, neo-Puritan point, to tell its single story and be done. But it makes that story indirectly so pertinent, and tells it with such an effortless flow of flawless detail, that unless I am mistaken it is going to enter the small pantheon of the significant books of our day.