The ten stories collected [in Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories] reveal a many-faceted if unextended talent concentrated mainly on the portrayal of woman acutely vulnerable to the burden of love enhanced by rejection.

Of such is the longest and ripest story, "A Place in the Country," in which the heroine loves her cousin's husband with a blind, despairing passion, deepest at the instant of parting. Neither in this story nor in any other in this volume does the author use a march of scenes to portray a conscious tension between two parts of her heroine's psyche. The structure of the stories, like the imagery, is suggestive rather than rounded. Shirley Hazzard has much of the delicacy and subtlety and poignancy that distinguished Katherine Mansfield and Willa Cather, but without the fulness of dilemma one finds in "Bliss" or "A Wagner Matinée."…

In bringing some characters into focus Miss Hazzard inter-poses too many minor figures. At times she uses introspection indiscriminately, as in "The Worst Moment of the Day" and "In One's Own House," where she plunges abruptly into the thoughts of four or five people in quick succession. Moreover, the internal life of no one character in Cliffs of Fall is fully realized.

If it is weak in certain aspects of structure, Miss Hazzard's art is rich and glowing in stylistic resources. Sparing and selective in her use of images, she often deftly brings her reader to the spot without entangling his senses further to keep him there. On occasion, as in the opening of "Weekend," she catches simultaneously the magic of color and sound and movement. Her most original stylistic gift, however, is for the deft characterizing abstraction: "He could not have been more embarrassed had he found her praying," "as aloof as curiosity would allow," "in her face poetry and reason met without the customary signs of struggle." One senses in Miss Hazzard's art a kind of reluctance to let any sentence, any phrase, escape her without meeting the stern critical tests she has imposed upon herself.

Miss Hazzard's themes rise from deep veins of involvement in moments of crisis, which she faces with relentless honesty; they derive also from close, exact observation of people and streets and houses of diverse lands.