SOURCE: "In the Fielding Country: Some Recent Fiction," in Yale Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 7, Autumn, 1957, pp. 143-56.

Price is an educator and author whose books include The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1973) and Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (1983). In the excerpt below, he praises By Love Possessed for its literary complexity and thorough presentation of the law, but faults the novel for its "tidy" picture of life and the insufficient development of the main character.

In its length, in its mannerisms, in its carefully "researched" presentation of a small town law firm, [By Love Possessed] bespeaks a long stretch of hard work. Its love of the machinery of the law or the Church recalls the work of Sinclair Lewis. And such speeches as Julius Penrose's sound like those Lewis was reported to deliver at bars while he was in the process of composing...