In the following essay, Cronin discusses the relationship between Jhabvala and her literary predecessors, whom Cronin describes as “the Englishmen who described life in Indian princely states in the 1920s.”

In the following essay, Kitley examines a number of literary elements present in Heat and Dust, including intertextuality and narrative structure.

In the following essay, Chew examines a number of works, including Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, that concern the princely states of India as the subject of historical fiction and “fiction-about-history.”

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's [In Search of Love and Beauty, her first novel] since the prize-winning Heat and Dust, is set largely in the United States. For a writer who has made Indian-Western relationships her own particular field, there is an element of risk in moving into new territory—in this case, cosmopolitan New York—which the natives themselves have cultivated with great success and perhaps to the point of exhaustion. The foreign writer must adopt an individual strategy unavailable t...

The follow-up to Heat and Dust has been a long time coming. And, although a fine novel, it's unlikely to keep [Jhabvala's] reputation at the sky-high level it suddenly achieved eight years ago. The narrative of In Search of Love and Beauty flits achronologically over the lives of a group of Austrian and German émigrés, comfortably resettled in America. They have contrived to get their money out, and have eluded Hitler. But refuge has its penalty in the pointlessness of refugee ex...