The Fountain Overflows is Miss Rebecca West's first novel for twenty-one years and is indeed only her sixth work of fiction. That this should be so is no doubt the price she has had to pay for her versatility as a writer. Are we to think of her primarily as a brilliant reporter, a great journalist? That she certainly is. But during her career as a writer she has played many parts: she has been, among other things, an admirable literary critic and a wonderfully astringent reviewer. Yet the publication of The Fountain Overflows proves that what she is above all, and what she ought to be, is a novelist; and in the light of this new novel, it is impossible not to regret her long years of absence from fiction.

It is not news that Miss West possesses a most formidable intelligence. Intellectually, she is, one feels, armed at all points; and though a formidable intelligence is not the first requisite of a novelist, other things being equal he will be a better novelist for having it. In point of fact, Miss West's early novels were not quite satisfactory as novels. She was one of the first English authors to grasp the value of psycho-analysis as part of the novelist's necessary equipment towards the understanding of human nature. In her earlier fiction, however, the formal element of psycho-analysis is altogether too obtrusive, so much so that The Return of the Soldier, her first novel, now reads like a dramatization of a case-history. In a too overt illustration of the working of the Oedipus Complex, it finally ruins her second novel, The Judge. Yet The Judge remains a work of real interest and distinction; it announces in character and theme some of its author's abiding preoccupations. First, there is the character of the heroine. However the novel may fail at the end, Ellen Melville is surely one of the most striking representations in all English fiction of a young woman. She is as passionate and as sure of herself as a Brontë heroine….

In her conscious feminism, of course, she goes far beyond the heroines of the Brontës and James. She is not the "New Woman"; she is of a later generation and can therefore take her rights for granted; but however different she may be from the male of the species she knows that she is his equal. She does so in part from the evidence of her intelligence, which is as formidable as her creator's; Ellen is very young, and Miss West's attitude towards her is one of affectionate irony, but reading the novel we do not for a moment question the brilliance of her mind. At the same time, she is firmly set in the context of her place and period, Edinburgh in the first decade of the century, during the suffragette campaign.

Then there is the quality of Miss West's imagination, which is very close to that of Ellen. Miss West is a romantic in much the way James and Conrad were. She chooses her characters from the exceptional, not the ordinary; she demands minds that are at once large and clear-thinking, ambitions that are lofty. And she uses her prose, which is richer in texture, more coloured and more sustained in imagery than contemporary prose normally is, to heighten her characters.

Finally, there is Miss West's view of the nature of life. It is by no means fully expressed in The Judge, but it may be felt there all the same and realized the more surely by the reader when he goes back to the novel after The Thinking Reed and The Fountain Overflows. There is, on the one hand, a passionate apprehension of the necessity and beauty of order, the lovely fruit of self-discipline and self-knowledge, and, on the other, an equally vivid apprehension that order is in constant danger from the forces of violence and destruction. In her later fiction Miss West seems to equate order with the female principle and the forces of destruction with the male….

In Harriet Hume, Miss West's third novel, this relationship between the male and the female is presented almost in Jungian terms, as the relationship between an ambitious, power-seeking politician and his anima. Harriet Hume is perhaps an ironical, fantastic parable rather than a novel and it can hardly be thought a success. Its irony is a little too easy, and its calculated artificiality of manner begins to embarrass. Yet Harriet Hume takes on a new interest in the light of The Fountain Overflows, for through the anima-figure, Harriet, a concert-pianist, we find first suggested the notion, so strong in The Fountain Overflows, that the value of music and no doubt of art generally lies in its creation of an order that is at once ideal and real and that in some sense provides a standard by which the disorderliness of life may be judged.

The notion is not heard in Miss West's next fictions, the long short stories of The Harsh Voice and the novel The Thinking Reed. In these we are in the international world of the very rich, in which money itself is the agent of destruction. The Thinking Reed remains an admirable novel. Again we have the young woman of formidable intelligence who can scarcely help thinking justly of reaching just conclusions, the American girl Isabelle, whose natural impulse to create a still centre of happiness and harmony is frustrated by the destructive impulses of the restless and arbitrary male will, first of her lover and then of her husband, and who is compelled, to save herself and her husband, to resort herself to at least the simulation of violence. It is in The Thinking Reed that Miss West most thoroughly explores the relationship between men and women. They are seen as existing in a state of polarity…. Miss West, in fact, is describing the state of unregenerate human nature. Still, it is enough for her purposes that Isabelle realizes that she is defenceless against others and herself except for the possession of "an insatiable craving for goodness."

In a sense, The Fountain Overflows takes up where The Thinking Reed leaves off; in her new novel, all the themes implicit in Miss West's earlier fiction come together. The Fountain Overflows is the first of what is planned to be a series of novels which will record the chronicles of the Aubrey family until the end of the Second World War, but it is complete in itself and can be judged as a single work. It has a richness and a solidity beyond any novel Miss West has written before, and it is technically a triumph. The fortunes of the Aubreys are related, from the vantage-point of almost half a century later, by the youngest of the three daughters, Rose; and Miss West conveys beautifully the brilliance of the child that Rose was and the formidable quality of her intelligence now….

Piers Aubrey, who stands for the forces of destruction in the novel, is a masterly creation. He is a brilliant journalist and pamphleteer, the dedicated crusader in the service of every cause that wins his allegiance. In the ordinary traffic of life, however, he is an impossible person….

As much as Marc in The Thinking Reed, Piers Aubrey does "not belong to the same race as women," and it is with the race of women that Miss West is almost exclusively concerned in The Fountain Overflows; of the only two other significant male characters in the novel, the one, Cousin Jock, is also a representative of the principle of destruction, and the other, Richard Quin, the Aubrey girls' beloved younger brother, is curiously unconvincing….

[Rarely has] the solidarity and the glow of family life been more beautifully described than in [The Fountain Overflows]. There is, however, a rebel in the family midst, the eldest daughter, Cordelia. Mary and Rose are intransigent in their apartness from the South London suburb in which they live: Cordelia pines for the normality it represents. No musician at all, according to her mother's standards, Cordelia still sees her violin as the weapon with which she will win acceptance from the world. To her sisters' horror, as a schoolgirl she becomes a leading executant of Raff's Cavatina at parish-hall concerts; in the end she is forced to face the truth about herself and her talent….

Whether, as it might seem, Miss West is merely offering us a new variation of the doctrine of election, or whether music itself is a powerful enough symbol of the serenity of order that she wishes to oppose to the destructive impulse, we must wait for the later novels to find out. Meanwhile, in The Fountain Overflows she has written a novel of much more than ordinary distinction and seriousness.