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Renault, Mary 1905–: Critical Essay by Rosamond Lehmann

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About 1 pages (277 words)
Mary Renault Summary

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[Renault's] subject in Kind Are Her Answers is love; her treatment of it is voluptuous, with an un-English physical directness. Her manner of writing has a tremendous feminine vitality—that sort of creative gusto which has proved first the strength and subsequently—controlled by no shaping intellectual maturity—the undoing of many a contemporary woman novelist….

This novel is about a love affair between a handsome, promising, unhappily married young doctor and an attractive, affectionate, promiscuous, child-like girl whom he meets in the course of his professional duties…. Many women readers will identify with her, finding her more appealing than I do…. [I] wish to point out the dreadful pitfalls yawning for Miss Renault: the flavour of self-indulgence, of facile lushness, of letting down the back hair by the fire, which might easily vitiate her natural gifts of imagination, the freshness of her sensuous impressions, and her power of creating character and atmosphere. Some of her minor portraits and landscapes are delightful. There is a superbly malicious sketch of some Oxford Groupers; and there is a description of a Victorian-Gothic house, its inmates, furniture, lawns, shrubberies and summer houses, which evokes in a rich, full-flavoured way not only itself but a whole period.

This is a free excerpt of 199 words. There are 277 words (approx. 1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.

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Renault, Mary 1905–: Critical Essay by Rosamond Lehmann from Literature Criticism Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.



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