[V. S. Pritchett] … has been writing good short stories for many years. He is … no longer at the top of his form, but the leading story in The Camberwell Beauty is quite equal to work he did in his prime. One of Pritchett's great advantages as a writer—and one which is becoming rarer as our cultures become more fragmented—is his ability to create a variety of backgrounds: he is not tied, as so many writers are, to a single and usually restricted world. "The Camberwell Beauty" takes place among antique dealers, the best imaginable milieu for the development of its Jamesian theme. Pritchett convinces us that dealers are collectors before they are businessmen: each has his specialty, porcelain or silver or rare miniatures: buying and selling furniture is simply a means toward an avaricious end. The Camberwell Beauty is a girl, loved by a young man who wishes to marry her, but she is collected as an object, first by a disreputable dealer named August and later by the richer and more respectable Pliny, who never touches her sexually though she becomes his wife.

To put the story in such blunt terms is to rob it of its beauty but at the same time to demonstrate the dependence of the characters and the plot on the skill with which Pritchett makes his enclave of collectors come to life. Other stories in the volume have equally convincing backgrounds, but there is never quite the same perfect marriage of setting to myth. (pp. 540-41)