[Miss Renault] is an artist to her finger tips. She writes prose that is precise and lyrical, arrestingly sensitive to the charms of nature as well as to the subtle dartings of the human mind—a fine fusion, in short, of apparent fragility with unsuspected strength….

She is sometimes too talky, too given to purely decorative effects. But ["Return to Night"] triumphs over this. And she knows how to tell a story. Unfortunately, the story she tells in the present case does not seem, to this reader at least, to do justice to all these obvious talents. It is different, but it is not compelling….

Reflection will have you shaking your head rather than tossing flowers at the story. But there is the redeeming virtue of Miss Renault's sharply perceptive writing. Her nearly flawless sense of detail, her poet's sense of beauty and mortality and loneliness, her sensitivity...