Readers with a general curiosity about the last twenty-five years of English literature need look no further than ["The Georgian Scene"]. There are, no doubt, more brilliant writers and better critics in England than Mr. Swinnerton, but I doubt if any writer is better informed. It is precisely its information which gives this book its melancholy value—this, and its author's extraordinarily pleasant manners. "Melancholy" because so few of the writers it mentions can ...

It is not clear why Mr. Frank Swinnerton has called his new novel Coquette. A coquette, one had always understood, was a lady who loved the work for its own sake, who found the evocation and frustration of desire a satisfying sport in itself; but his Sally Minto was moved in her first encounter with a man by real passion and in her second by ambition. A novel about a coquette would be primarily … a discussion of the mystery of athleticism, that passion which leads human beings to spend their lives at...

[The Georgian Scene] contains essays on approximately seventy-five writers who range in time from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and in importance from Shaw and Bennett to Edgar Wallace and Noel Coward. A few of the discussions are quite perfunctory, and the space devoted to each often seems to bear little relation to either the popularity or the significance of the subject, but the best are genuinely illuminating and nearly all both informative and readable. Mr. Swinnerton quite frankly discusses his authors f...

One secret of the charm of Frank Swinnerton's "Nocturne" is what may be called the warm disinterest, or sympathetic detachment, of the chronicler. He doesn't mean his little episode to "teach" anything: it is simply there before us, yet by no means as a "slice of life", for what makes it alive is the radiant energy of creative art. The artist's self as well as his skill informs it. Irony would be too cold a word for its mood, for there is someth...

A new novel by Frank Swinnerton published in his 92nd year. I make no apology for referring to the author's age. It is utterly relevant. And what do we see opposite the title-page? No less than forty fiction titles listed, followed by fifteen other titles. What an achievement. It makes another man blush for shame. Only yesterday I received a card from a celebrated woman author, intellectual and sometime contributor to b&b … saying: 'What, I ask myself, is a bookman? Have I ever met ...

[The following essay is part of a thesis presented at The University of Pennsylvania in 1927.] To speak of Swinnerton's novels in general we may say that he writes principally of the lower middle class life in London and in the cheaper suburbs. The exceptions to this are the three successful studies of the upper middle classes found in The Casement, Shops and Houses and September. His greatest weakness is in plot work; few of his endings have a finished effect, the reader is left dangling, dissatisfi...

"Swinnerton" leaps, as it were, from ring to ring. Its sub-title should be changed from "An Autobiography" to "A Circus," and I make this suggestion without rancor, for there are many things less pleasant than a circus, and few more calculated to take our minds away from fact. In a circus all the performers have a glamor which is not false, but fictitious: and only if we are very small children do we think that they are what they so beautifully pretend to be…...

What a familiar ring it has, 'the novel.' A comfort to the spinster and the secretary, and a temporary refuge for 'the reader' in an imagined world. A world in which effect follows cause, emotions are excited only to be soothed, adventure and surprise are muted in the pianissimo of a final chapter. The novel is now the armchair of our culture. I would hate to be considered a rabid experimentalist, but I often wish that contemporary English writing were something other than the fa...

[Here] is a literary problem for you. Read the following passage, and guess who wrote it: Mr. Sims was in a better position than either Mr. Leicester or Mr. Twist. At a word from Mr. Sims, both Mr. Twist and Mr. Leicester would have been forced to leave the firm. They, although they had worked there for fifteen years and a quarter of a century respectively, and although they knew the business through and through, and could produce the papers unaided, had no status. They could be dismissed at a ...

[Mr. Swinnerton] sees life and renders it with a steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition. He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. Seen through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens, more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. There the business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or any one to do anything. (p. x) Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. Ja...

Possibly the lowest sort of reviewing is the type which borrows overgenerously from the blurb on the highly colored book jacket—that eye-catcher which proudly quotes the welcome bouquets of a favored few who have seen the masterpiece in galleys or in manuscript…. In the case of "A Woman in Sunshine" the yellow jacket is misleading…. It purports to describe a novel concerned chiefly with "a good woman who is also an exciting one."… The woman in question...

[Nocturne] is neither grey nor gay, neither realism in its docket nor romance in its pigeon-hole. It is a book of fact but also of arrangement, of insight as well as observation; of dramatic action as well as sympathy. In short, it is a work of imaginative art, holding its magic mirror (and not a mere reflector) up to nature. To this roundness and fulness within its slender bounds [H. G.] Wells is paying tribute when he writes to Mr. Bennett, "You know, Arnold, he achieves a perfection in Nocturne th...

Near 80, Verdi composed "Falstaff", at 80, England's Frank Swinnerton writes "Quadrille." "Quadrille" is no "Falstaff," to be sure, but it is a like example of perdurable creative power. Mr. Swinnerton has composed upward of 50 books in his lifetime. Of this number, at least 35 are novels…. This novel is certainly among his best. The final installment of a quartet (the others were "The Woman From Sicily," "A Tigress i...

Those who have read Frank Swinnerton's earlier volume of literary reminiscences, "Background With Chorus," know what to expect of "Figures in the Foreground." It is, as the author says himself, "a book of personal gossip," but it is the gossip of a man who writes from experience at first hand. Mr. Swinnerton has spent his life among books and among those who make them…. In his new book he draws on his memories of British literary life between 1917 and ...

In ["The Georgian House"] the author has assembled a number of well-tried and generally reliable ingredients: an old-fashioned house with a secret panel; a hero who is at the beginning of the book living under an assumed name and is evidently under some sort of romantic cloud, from which he is called home to take his inheritance; a wise old lady who understands the young things; a missing will; a thorough-paced villainess; a black-mailing lawyer's clerk; and other stand-bys too numerous...

For the past forty years, two-thirds of his long career as a writer, Mr. Frank Swinnerton has lived in a restored seventeenth-century cottage in the Surrey village of Cranleigh…. At least, he calls it a village, for, in spite of all the urbanization of the Home Counties, he has managed to remain confidently under the impression that he lives deep in the English countryside. Indeed, one of the attractions of Reflections from a Village comes from the otherwise by no means unsophisticated author'...

The title of Mr. Swinnerton's new book [The Doctor's Wife Comes to Stay] is Trollopean, and so in a sense is the story. An energetic and successful young artist, egotistical but attractive, finds that his wife is not content merely with household duties, nor even with the small celebrity of occasional parts in "little theatre" productions. The immense success of the play in which she is acting obtains for her an offer of the leading part in its American production; and she goes t...

Every page of [Young Felix] shows the author to be a perceptive and thoughtful person. But ever since I finished reading it, I have been wondering what it is that he has been attempting. Young Felix is the story of the first thirty years of a man's life. Is it only a prologue to an enormous work five times its length, in which case its shapelessness is only apparent? If so, Mr. Swinnerton is unfair to himself in not giving us warning. If not, what are we to make of it? There must have been a moment w...

It would be hard to maintain that Nor All Thy Tears comes up to the standard of [Swinnerton's] best fiction, since despite its lively construction and wide range of characters, there is a certain lack of verisimilitude about much of their behaviour which, alas, depends largely on the way they talk and the attitudes they express—inescapably those of an earlier age. The tough twenty-five-year-old heiress to a Fleet Street empire, who is the focus of attention, is somewhat inclined to shriek and ...

The structure of [Nocturne] is almost classic. The events take place in the course of a single night. And each chapter folds upon the other without visible apertures or creaking joints, so that in retrospect the mind encompasses the whole with a single gesture. In theme and treatment is seems to usher in a coming democratization of art. Here is no preoccupation with the commonplace from the contemptous elevation of the intellectual aristocrat—Mr. Swinnerton approaches the vulgarest of his creatures w...

To use the word "old-fashioned" in describing [Harvest Comedy] is to praise it highly, for it is old-fashioned in the sense that it tells a gripping story and that it gives to each character a scrupulous care that is reminiscent of the method of Dickens…. The story traces the careers of [the three main characters] in London, with their various ups and downs, their marriages and their love affairs, but it does much more than this: it shows us the inside of every life…. In another ...