[Miss Renault's theme in Return to Night] is love: the love between a woman doctor of thirty-four, bruised by an unhappy affair with a hospital colleague, and a much younger man whose will has been destroyed and his ambition crushed by the gentle domination of his mother. The story is well, though somewhat lengthily, told, and Miss Renault succeeds in engaging one's sympathy for her characters. The novel's construction shows, however, several faults of method. First, attention is concentrated upon the two principal characters throughout, when in so leisurely a novel one requires either a greater expansiveness … or, alternatively, a much more emphatic, intense and economical concentration upon the central issue. Secondly, there is a certain distortion through the employment of the third person method of narration, when in fact everything is presented from Hilary's—the doctor's—viewpoint. As a result of this one is able to see only the boy, Julian, as a "case," whereas it should be made much clearer to the reader that the woman's love for him has foundations as equivocal as his own for her…. Lastly, and in general, the relationship and its significance are not adequately pondered over and thought out, and the book ends, as a consequence, with unsatisfactory inconclusiveness. It is a story with undertones of unhappiness which Miss Renault doesn't seem to know what to do with. Shy of ending the book, as would have been appropriate, with the decisive gesture of tragedy, she lets it draw to a close on an uncertain, unsatisfactory suspended note.
D. S. Savage, "Fiction: 'Return to Night'," in The Spectator (© 1947 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), Vol. 179, No. 6218, August 29, 1947, p. 284.
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