Like many another woman writer excessively drawn to the kind (and unkind) hearts and coronets scene—or to its American counterpart—Pearl Sydenstricker Buck escaped downright badness only by a hairsbreadth…. Certainly, it's hard now to conceive Miss Buck trawling in a Nobel Prize—and for literature at that—even as a Buggin's Turn candidate in a lean year. [The Woman Who Was Changed, the] latest collection from under the belt of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation Inc.—only two of its tales have been published before—confirms once again a talent that's agreeable but markedly striated with flaws.

Five of these stories, for instance, enjoy happy arrangements at their endings. Emphatic endings are, of course, the formal prerogative of short stories. With so generally scanty a middle to go on with, even in a nouvelle-length piece like Miss Buck's title story, short fictions inevitably press rather hard on the ending they have chosen so rapidly to press on to. But plots offering you gladness as a consolation prize for the briskness of the dash you have just been made to put in are no part of the form's necessities. On the contrary, the better short stories frequently end with just the sort of tougher wryness that Miss Buck cannot keep up, with the reversals, puzzles and shock that she makes it her finales' business to phase out.

[In the title story, her] ur-feminist writer, for example, who quits a greyly enclosing bank-manager spouse for isolated freedom and writing, finds at the end a charming Swede who gives her … light and air, as well as the writing space she's craved…. Repeated instances of this final upbeat seem to seal Miss Buck's endings into the cosier nooks of Home Chat.

Far toughter than these wistfully soggy endings, however, are the frequent manifestations of Miss Buck's indignation over the way a male world commonly treats women and girls…. [There] is no denying the power with which she can organize a quite raw anger. In "If It Must Be So" a woman whose husband has not worked since the depression and who must keep her job as a waitress and cannot possibly afford more children, winkles an illegal abortion out of a front-street doctor, shocked into helpful action by his own daughter's confession of horrid dealings with backstreet aborters. The readers of Home Chat are just the sort of women—the doctor's wife and mother-in-law are particularly trite in their moralizings—the story is pointfully aimed at. And yet, after all, this tale ends as another sob-jerker, as our doctor's daughter Looks Up Again At Her Daddy With the Old Pride in Her Eyes.

The disappointment is as great in the title story. For much of its length this is as nice an articulation of the uprising married woman theme as one can find anywhere. The narrative is shrewdly detailed…. The writing is frequently stylish, rising on occasion to a quite Jamesian irony. And the way Virginia Woolf's point about letters being "the unpublished works of women" is expanded as part of Eleanor's awakening is deft as could be: married, she missed writing all those letters to her fiancé; their absence compelled her into fiction. And yet, what Pearl Buck rewards Eleanor with is a Swede-packing future up mountains on cream-coloured ponies.