Rebecca West's new novel ["The Judge"] is a brilliant piece of work, forceful, impressive, haunting with a sense of instance…. Her one previous novel, her critical work, and her essays have shown her to possess a keenly probing intellect, a rich mental background and a notable gift for the art of writing. All this, in fuller, richer development and in finer quality, is evident in "The Judge," but through its pages there shines, too, the clear, unmistakable light of genius. In its insight into the deeps of human nature, and especially of feminine human nature, in its treatment of the drama of human life, in the richness of its fabric and in the force and power and skill with which it uses, for the purposes of the story, the element of personality in its characters, the novel is comparable with the work of George Eliot at her best, although falling short, in some respects, of the measure of her artistic excellence. But it is as different from her fiction as this age is different from George Eliot's period. For it is franker, truer, comes to closer grips with the forces of life, seeks more ruthlessly to find the roots of motive, the sources of character, the causes of action.

It is a long novel containing close upon two hundred thousand words, and its story could be boiled down into the compass of half a dozen sentences. Nevertheless, with such skill has Miss West painted her characters, marshaled her temperaments, used her emotional elements, that the attention is at once enlisted and the interest grows constantly deeper and more absorbing until the end. Stripped down to its last essentials, it is a story of the love of a man for the girl he intends to marry cutting across his love for his mother. But it would be as inadequate to describe it thus as to say of a tempestuous, thrilling, dramatic conflagration merely that "a fire burned down such and such a block yesterday," for this situation of a man greatly loving his promised wife and yet being deeply absorbed in his lifelong love of his mother not only flowers out into drama in the present, but opens the doors into the past and shows the fateful story being enacted, step by step, that lives on from one generation to the next. It is out of this sense of continuing destiny that the novel takes its title, for "the Judge" is the mother of children, the woman who by her choice of their father determines their fate, visits upon them their destiny….

Through the first half of the book the outstanding figure is Ellen Melville, 17 years old, child of an Irish father and a Scotch mother, a vivid, dreaming, practical, ambitious, red-haired typist in a lawyer's office in Edinburgh. It was an audacious thing for an author to conceive in the first place and then to attempt to work out and put down in cold type such a conglomerate of opposed qualities as Miss West has fused together in Ellen, with her Scotch mentality and her Scotch-Irish temperament. But the attempt is successful, for Ellen, with all her moods and her surprises and her contrarieties, her ardent generosities and her thrift and her forethoughtedness, her tempers and her glowing joys, is a logical, convincing character. One knows her, believes in her, loves her and rejoices always in her presence. In a novel notable for the variety and unusual quality of its character portrayal she stands easily first as the most clearly and vividly painted personality in the book….

[The second] half of the book, doubtless in part because its elements are those of which human agonies and human ecstacies are chiefly made, holds the interest at a higher tension than does the first half. But in part this is due also to the closer, more rapid treatment of the theme. The author does not so often stand off and speculate, nor does she so frequently stop to hold the spotlight a little longer on a result or a situation already sufficiently elucidated—a fault too often evident in the first half of the story. In this second part she herself seemed to have become so absorbed that the emotional intensity of the narrative forced her pen rapidly on and on and forbade her to stop for necessary words.

Although it is a drama of many tragedies that drives its way inexorably on to its final tragic scenes, there is in it much of sunshine and laughter, crisp humor and happy hours…. The author has an epigrammatic wit that sparkles frequently, especially when she is mentioning some characteristic of the Scotch, whom she calls "an unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees." And she has a happy faculty of phrasing neatly, sometimes poetically, an interesting or a significant thought….

The book is, pre-eminently, a woman's book, because woman is the vessel of creation, and herein she is shown busy, body, soul, and mind. In the business for which nature demands her services. The men in the novel are brilliantly portrayed, but they are not quite as convincing as the women, do not carry in their lineaments the assurance of quite such fullness of knowledge in the mind of their creator. And one somehow gets the impression from them that Rebecca West hasn't a very high opinion of men. (p. 19)