SOURCE: “The Scarlett Woman,” in New Republic, Vol. 17, No. 210, November 9, 1918, p. 48.

In the following review, Hackett contends that The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett is full of cheap puns and slapstick and exhibits a lack of didacticism.

For a long time the best novelists have written novels of motive. They haven't aimed to tell a story and left it at that. They have sought, practically all of them, to act omnisciently about their children, to give the how and the why of everything. The object hasn't been moral so much as psychological.

Out of this tendency Mr. Compton Mackenzie comes to narrate the early life and adventures of a vivid creature named Sylvia Scarlett [in his The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett]. She is not such a creature as the disengaged James Stephens might dance away with. She belongs to the very same world...