[In The Humbler Creation] Miss Johnson's style and her material are in tune—almost too much in tune. Only her descriptive, figurative and symbolic use of light and color call attention to the prose. The author writes of skies that are transparent, violet, cobalt, brilliant with stars and lime-green. She described blazes, bubbles, gleams and lozenges of light that may be pale, deforming, dull, reflected, lemon, sallow, torporous or sour and that comes from fire, lamp, sun and moon. Characters radiate light figuratively: there's the "so inhumanly bright" assistant vicar whose romance "suffered from the limelight of a parish" and who was wont to send "an azure gleam of amusement in Maurice's direction." Fisher's principles are "illuminating," Libby "glows" only at bazaars and as Alice's father-in-law lies dying in "moneyed brightness" the author takes us into the "stained-glass windows of his mind." Alice's room is literally and symbolically...