"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed," wrote Pascal in the passage from which the title of Rebecca West's new novel ["The Thinking Reed"] is taken. The phrase is curiously suggestive of Miss West's own work. "Thinking," none could deny who watched the flashing wit in her essays of feminism many years ago; nor in the subsequent volumes of her literary essays, at all too widely spaced intervals. But a reed also is something through which music may be made, and even in Miss West's critical writing (sometimes, I have suspected, in spite of herself) there often has been a lyrical note with both depth and distinction. Her lyricism had a chance for fuller expression in the novels—in "The Return of the Soldier" in 1925 and "Harriet Hume" four years later. And in the four short novels published together in 1935 as "The Harsh Voice," there seemed to be a surer unity of wit and feeling than I had been aware of previously in her work.
Both strains reappear in this far more ambitious book…. [The] essence of the story is not in the mood of one outside, looking on. It has the directness of the novelist, not the detachment of the critic. Its substance is the conflict within a woman between her idea of herself and her pride in herself and her need and capacity to love….
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