Miss Johnson's is the humanistic, not the satirical, eye…. [In "The Honours Board"] she gives us telling portraits of the people in and around [a] small, not very distinguished, upper-middle-class school (all of the characters begin by saying that class distinctions don't matter in Britain any more, and end by suspecting that they do). Central are Cyril and Grace Annick, the aging headmaster and his wife, devoted equally to the school and to each other, and the much longed-for and at-last acquired truly scholarly student, Peter Quillan. It is on him that they fasten their hopes to put their preparatory school on the map intellectually, by his winning a scholarship to one of the great schools on the next rung in the English private educational ladder, Eton or Winchester or Harrow. The peculiar intimacy, even devotion, which develops between masters in schools like this and their wives on the one hand, and certain students on the other, is affectingly shown—the way in which these people whose lives are devoted to their schools watch students come, help them to flourish, and watch them go, rarely to return. The depiction of this rich, poignant and true relationship instead of the usual brutal, uncomprehending clichés is enough to lend distinction to the novel.

The essence of prose fiction is particularity, concreteness, the portrayal of a world about which the reader, largely ignorant of it, will say, "Yes, it must be like this, that's the way it has to be." At this Miss Johnson excels. All the tensions of faculty in-fighting are brought into the pitiless daylight, the most intimate secrets of each master and wife are shown to be the casual small change of everyone else's daily conversation, seams of adultery, kleptomania, lesbianism, alcoholism and most of all strangling loneliness are traced through the school, all set forth in a relaxed, clear, conversational prose.

Miss Johnson's aim in "The Honours Board" is limited, and perhaps because of that, very accurate. Her characters suspect that in the far off world people like themselves and private schools such as this have a small and steadily shrinking place. But just as they finally conclude that class distinctions may be durable, they conclude that the kind of education they offer may prove durable too. This kind of novel, with its author's implicit claims to omniscience about her characters, its conventional structure and attention to nuance, has a shrinking place in literary fashion today. But I suspect it will prove very durable too. (pp. 4, 42)