Gardner is an English-born Canadian educator and critic. In this excerpt from her book-length study of Wilson, she discusses The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos.

In this excerpt from his book-length study of Wilson, Faulkner analyzes the stories in Wilson's first two collections of short stories, noting the author's developing style.

In this essay, Stape analyzes a number of Wilson's lesser-known stories. The critic focuses on the incidents from the author's life that contributed to the tales and discusses the manner in which the characters and themes of the stories are reflected in Wilson's subsequent novels.

In this excerpt from his book-length commentary regarding his development as a writer, Wilson discusses the manner in which events and characters from his life influenced his short fiction.

In this chapter from his book-length study of Wilson, Halio discusses the author's first two collections of short stories and outlines the characters, situations, and constructs employed in his fiction.

An English man of letters, Bradbury is best known as the author of such satiric novels as Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965). He has also, as a literary critic, written extensively on English and American literature, especially the works of E. M. Forster. In this analysis, he discusses Wilson 's unusual mix of moral realism and absurd, grotesque characters.

Who would choose to live in a novel by Angus Wilson? His characters are constantly exposed to the cruel publicity of society: everyone finds himself involuntarily, often unwittingly, on show. He may ache for silence and privacy, yearn to cultivate his inner life like a secret garden, but here the most retiring and insignificant people are condemned to be public figures…. Husbands and wives, parents and children, discover that there is nothing more demandingly public than private life. They have to le...

In this essay, originally published in Cox's 1963 book The Free Spirit, the critic argues that Wilson's short stories represent a liberal humanist attitude but that the author's pessimism about human life makes his humanist sentiments less idealistic than those of authors like English novelist E. M. Forster.

In the following excerpt, taken from an interview conducted in the fall of 1971, Wilson discusses various writers that have influenced his work, including Charles Dickens, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett.

An English poet, novelist, and critic, Bayley is best known for his critical studies of Thomas Hardy, Alexander Pushkin, and Leo Tolstoy. In this review, Wilson's stories are compared to the work of English authors D. H. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling, though Bayley finds that Wilson's early stories, in particular, are "in a class of their own. "

In this mixed review of A Bit Off the Map, the critic approves of Wilson's "accurate " and "kindly " fictional observations but speculates that the stories might become dated due to their emphasis on contemporary society.

It is well known that Wilson has been complicating his art in the later novels, beginning with No Laughing Matter…. His early novels, notably Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, sat comfortably if not comfortingly within the tradition of English realism. They were about what they appeared to be about, no more and no less. Mainly, they were about the comedy, irony, and tragedy of social existence, of being present to oneself by being present, necessarily, to oth...

In the following excerpt, Millgate finds A Bit Off the Map to be more compassionate than Wilson's earlier story collections. The critic also believes that the book is an insightful guide to the English social structure after World War II.

Oates is an American fiction writer and critic who is perhaps best known for her novel Them (1969), which won a National Book Award in 1970. Her fiction is noted for its exhaustive presentation of realistic detail as well as its striking imagination, especially in the evocation of abnormal psychological states. As a critic, Oates has written on a remarkable diversity of authors—from Shakespeare to Herman Melville to Samuel Beckett—and is appreciated for the individuality and erudition that ch...

[Although] the novel is old enough to have a "tradition," which some would like to mortify by calling "great," writers like Angus Wilson are more likely to be drawn to the form precisely for its vulnerability to shapelessness and its susceptibility to vulgarity than to its respectability. Such a writer exposes himself in the act of writing to the same dangers and possibilities his readers struggle with every day. He is not a superior specimen, but a gifted equal. During his long ...

Setting the World on Fire is Angus Wilson's richest, most complex novel, if, in the last resort, one of the least satisfying. Yet, that being said, the dissatisfaction seems unjustified; all the Wilson skills are displayed, all that imaginative power and reflective insight that makes him for me, possibly the greatest English novelist of the post-war years. So what has gone wrong? It is a deeply symbolic novel, operatic in its symbolism and deliberately so, and perhaps it is just this that is unsettli...

In this mixed review of Death Dance: Twenty-Five Stories, Kirsch criticizes Wilson's detachment in his stories and his overemphasis on English class relations, traits that often result in one-dimensional characters.

In the following review, Benét praises The Wrong Set, noting that Wilson 's writing "is marked by sharp detail and a keen eye and ear. "

Wilson expresses the problem of the contemporary novelist in a striking question: "How can we combine caring with shaping?" The remarkable feature of his own career as a writer has been the way in which, despite the nihilistic tendencies of the age, Wilson has retained his care for humanity while enriching the formal elements of his work—though the formal complexity of the early works is often under-estimated…. Wilson agrees with the suggestion that his later novels reveal a less...

Setting the World on Fire is an elaborately structured book; I am sure that academic commentators will soon find many … crafty parallels, convergences and contrasts in it. The fantasy in Wilson's earlier fiction is usually negative, cruel and evil. In this novel he has opened himself to hedonistic imaginings of beauty, wealth, glamour, energy and talent, giving them free rein, though with just enough control to turn fantasy into art; the result can reasonably be called baroque. It is noticeabl...

Angus Wilson's uncommon energy is demonstrated not only by the number of his books … but also by the very fiber of his writing. As a novelist he is tireless in his pursuit of each and every character. He pounces upon the slightest telltale gesture or turn of phrase. Elision—the gliding over of smaller occurrences, summation of random conversations or any other form of creative shorthand—appears to strike him as a kind of cheating. He is meticulous, exhaustive in building up his s...

Angus Wilson is a British writer of repute who doesn't rattle any skeletons. His latest novel, Setting the World on Fire … is about as old-fashioned—indeed, doddering—a literary gesture as you can get. The only fire is in its title. The book itself is so stodgy that one is led to wonder whether Wilson intended the stodginess to be taken ironically, as a flicker of defiance; after all, it is filled with snatches of intelligence, as English novels generally are. Unfortunately, the ...