[Fifteen] years after "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," Miss West publishes a new novel ["The Fountain Overflows"], a real Dickensian Christmas pudding of a book. In fact, it is very like Dickens. It is as full of characters—odd and even, but mostly odd—as a pudding of plums; full of incident, full of family delights, full of parties and partings, strange bits of London, the Iobby of the House of Commons, a classic murder with portraits of the murderer, the murderee and a couple of innocent bystanders, bill collectors, kitchen fires, good food, and a considerable quota of ghosts…. In short, this is a very novelish sort of novel—old-fashioned, busy and extremely readable. (p. 1)

[The] most remarkable thing about "The Fountain Overflows" is how good, how enjoyable a book Miss West's talent makes it. It is extravagant and melodramatic and full of coincidences in quite the nineteenth-century way. So, of course, are many avant-garde novels—but in these, symbolism is offered as an explanation of the artifices: indeed, most avant-garde authors are so intent upon their symbols that the fact that they have produced melodrama quite escapes their attention. Miss West, however, is not working with symbols. Her people are people, their desperate situations are desperate situations, not allegories. Can she, then, be forgiven for extravagance and melodrama?

I think she can. If she is not working with symbols, she is working toward signification. Life has meaning, she wishes to say; and in order to show that meaning clearly, she must use extreme situations. Also, she must invoke unfashionable abstractions: honor, generosity, devotion, dedication, love. These are words that are easy to use as words, and that have been contaminated by over-use by all the positive thinkers. To this degree, Miss West's message is weakened: it arouses unfortunate echoes.

But Miss West does not use these words as words at all, she creates, brilliantly and decisively, situations which illustrate them in action. If she fails to convince fully—and I do not think she brings off this difficult task with complete success—it is a failure of technique, not of intention. Unlike poor Cordelia, she knows what she is doing, she knows the demands of art. She does walk the edge of sentimentality and put a foot wrong here or there. She still wields the broom of generalized obiter dicta with a sweep that occasionally knocks down character and reader alike. She is, I have a sneaking suspicion, a bit too fond of some of her creations: just a little, she dotes. All this tends to reduce by a degree the size of the world that she is creating, and to lessen its importance; but, to flourish a generalization of my own, it is still a world that she is creating, and creating in the right way. Also, it is still a world that is a delight to enter and to live in, warm and vital, inventive and constantly entertaining. (pp. 1, 18)