A middle-aged neurotic who is drinking herself blind in squalid solitude begins a journal (as a kind of therapy, of course). Wanna read it? No? I thought not. It's hard to get past the opening pages of the dismal confessions of Lynne Reid Banks's heroine [of "Children at the Gate"] without concluding that her Gerda is that poor girl of everyone's acquaintance who has lost her child and husband, and now just wants to die, and goes out into the street without combing her hai...

A Londoner of Scotch-Irish background, Lynne Reid Banks shares a lot of the virtues of her British contemporaries, such younger women novelists as Margaret Drabble and Maureen Duffy. Like theirs, her work concerns the lives of young, middle-class British women who, though rather surprisingly apolitical to American eyes, are searching for new life styles that will free them from the joyless patterns of current bourgeois family life. There is a solid, open toughness about their styles, and an unsparing, almos...

As anyone knows who has followed Lynne Reid Banks further than The L-Shaped Room, her passionate involvement with Israel became and remains a constant literary theme—indeed, Defy the Wilderness is a fictional by-product of historical research into the first Arab-Israeli war. If it sounds disparaging to call a powerful and professional novel a "by-product", the author can be blamed, for telling us about its conception, and still more for clarifying in the first few pages precisely how we...

To write a full-length novel about the Brontës is surely a new idea? So many biographies and critical studies have been published about the famous family that it would seem reasonable to suppose nothing more remained to be said about them. It could even be argued that the spate of analysis and assessment has blurred the true picture of life at Haworth. Dark Quartet redresses the balance and provides a new perspective. Through the freedom of narrative and dialogue, the Brontës are presented as ...

Some books have a success partly because of their worth but also because they seem to hit the right note for the zeitgeist at their moment of publication. One thinks of Lucky Jim, The Virgin Soldiers and The L-Shaped Room. Kingsley Amis has been wise to resist the temptation to write a Son of Lucky Jim, but Leslie Thomas and Lynne Reid Banks have both succumbed. There is even a Y-shaped house in Two is lonely, being built by solidly masculine, 44-year-old Andy whom Jane Graham is considering as a 'da...

With [Two Is Lonely] Lynne Reid Banks ends the trilogy which began in an L-shaped room in Fulham. Her heroine is thirty-six and tired, and her creator seems tired too. The illegitimate son conceived and born to Jane in that first volume is now eight and—apparently troubled by fatherlessness—given to nightly attacks of hysteria. His need for a father is made a somewhat unconsidered motive for his mother's capable scrutiny of the scene, and her relations with men in the past and present a...

[Miss Reid Banks's intention in The Backward Shadow] is not to work on any grand literary scale but merely to please by appealing to our least healthy romantic longings. Such writers as she provide satisfaction of a kind for those whose common prayer takes the form: 'please God, give me a handsome lover and then let him die of an incurable disease; give me a beautiful shop in a little village and then let it almost burn down,' set alight of course by a shadowy Brontëan lunatic; n...

Children at the Gate is Lynne Reid Banks's third novel and her best. The L-Shaped Room was touching and competent. This study of an unhappy woman painfully learning to love is ambitious and mature. Perhaps because she attempts a more intricate story and deeper statements and observations, it is uneven. There is some self-indulgent chatter on the part of the narrator. The first-person treatment is a good vehicle for the self-revelation which is the theme of the book. But there are perils in forcing yo...

L is for Loneliness. Also for Love. And L is the physical shape of the dreary, bug-ridden room on the top floor of an old rooming house to which Jane Graham, 27, unmarried, flees after her first disappointing experience with "love" to wait out its consequences. And, in this lovely first novel ["The L-Shaped Room"] by a young Englishwoman, it is love that finally shapes the L-shaped room. Love is the book's theme, developed in bright, warm prose, through diverse and interes...

[The] prose of Lynne Reid Banks [in Defy the Wilderness] seems generous to a fault, stuttering sensuous adjectives in loose profusion like the unruly hairpins shed by her over-wrought heroine. Ann Randall, a middle-aged English novelist who has married late after spending six formative years as a teacher on a kibbutz, returns to Jerusalem to interview veterans of the first Arab-Israeli war. The turmoil she finds there among old friends and new loves compels her to reinterpret her past and renew her commitme...

The L-Shaped Room is a disappointing first novel about a pregnant girl who is thrown out of house and home and has to go live in a nasty little room in Fulham to await her baby. It's disappointing because Miss Reid Banks has got such a good theme: how do people treat an unmarried mother nowadays, how do they react to her, and most important, how does she react, and how does she feel as those unwanted months go by? But Miss Reid Banks chucks her opportunity away in a conventional boarding-house saga, ...