Highsmith's purposes are evidently sterner than the mere setting down of [a] sad chronicle of family life [in Edith's Diary]: her characters and their circumstances are transparently emblematic of the state of the Union, as well as of the union, in the horrible Vietnam years—the do-gooding that refuses responsibility and results too easily in death for the done-good-by, the lying and evasions of men unwilling to accept the consequences of their actions, the inheritance by the rootless and thoughtless of America the once-beautiful, the irrevocable passing of that patrician strain that, for all its shortcomings, carried within it the ideals of 1776. It is a very pessimistic view of America and, in Miss Highsmith's wonderfully insinuating prose, a very convincing one. Can it really be like that? (p. 699)

Miss Highsmith has always been a strong and richly imaginative entertainer, and "Edith's Diary" is her strongest, her most imaginative, and by far her most substantial…. [Edith] is a firmly committed liberal with a clear view of the realities of world affairs, but her diary tells a different story: it gives her satisfaction there to soften, and even beautify, the rough edges of family and domestic truth…. The diary entries take on a brighter and brighter glow. "Edith's Dairy" is a work of extraordinary force and feeling. (pp. 86-7)