[Fifteen] years after "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," Miss West publishes a new novel ["The Fountain Overflows"], a real Dickensian Christmas pudding of a book. In fact, it is very like Dickens. It is as full of characters—odd and even, but mostly odd—as a pudding of plums; full of incident, full of family delights, full of parties and partings, strange bits of London, the Iobby of the House of Commons, a classic murder with portraits of the murderer, the murderee and a couple of innocent bystanders, bill collectors, kitchen fires, good food, and a considerable quota of ghosts…. In short, this is a very novelish sort of novel—old-fashioned, busy and extremely readable. (p. 1)
[The] most remarkable thing about "The Fountain Overflows" is how good, how enjoyable a book Miss West's talent makes it. It is extravagant and melodramatic and full of coincidences in quite the nineteenth-century way. So, of course, are many avant-garde novels—but in these, symbolism is offered as an explanation of the artifices: indeed, most avant-garde authors are so intent upon their symbols that the fact that they have produced melodrama quite escapes their attention. Miss West, however, is not working with symbols. Her people are people, their desperate situations are desperate situations, not allegories. Can she, then, be forgiven for extravagance and melodrama?
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