The Happy Foreigner is quite as ingenious as A Diary Without Dates, and has none of the qualities that made that book so curiously detestable. Miss Bagnold has still the same almost uncanny perceptiveness for the things of sight and sound, smell and touch, the same cold desire for experience, the same objective aloofness. But this time she does not display the inhuman lack of sympathy of her first "Anatomy of Nursing."… Nowhere is the new sympathy which Miss Bagnold has found more apparent than in her treatment of the relations between the American Army and the French. She has the courage to affirm what we are all more or less aware of—i.e., the bad feeling which existed between them—and she has insight enough to sympathize with both sides. (p. 278)
The love story that runs through the tale, unlike most of such narratives which are put in to "brighten" what is really a personal experience, is admirably sentimental and most convincing. (p. 279)
"Books: 'The Happy Foreigner'," in The Spectator (© 1920 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), Vol. 125, No. 4809, August 28, 1920, pp. 278-79.
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