In no sense a fantasy, ["National Velvet"] is still the kind of book which it is best not to try to resist; it should be allowed to cast its spell with the full consent of the reader. Rightly and high-handedly allowing no room for quibbles as to whether the events described were probable, the author merely gives them a lucid actuality—saying take it or leave it, here it is. Wise readers will take it and like it…. Velvet does not walk or run; she trots or canters. Her love for hor...

Except for its sharpness of observation and its delicate humor, there is little to connect the author of "National Velvet" with this informal diary, written when Miss Bagnold was 19. For reasons which now seem incomprehensible, the publication of "A Diary Without Dates" produced a flurry in wartime England and caused Miss Bagnold's dismissal from the military hospital where she was working as a V.A.D. It is true that her book … shows a certain hostility to the siste...

With the loveliest humor and feeling, with words that are alive, fresh, simply and unwaveringly accurate, Enid Bagnold puts [the Browns of "National Velvet"] before us…. With never an overplus word, no slackening of pace, with loving magic power, she puts us inside in. We are the Browns. We are Velvet…. I do not know where you would go in recent fiction to find a family interior more superbly captured, made real; every line of dialogue true, moving, progressive, relevant to plot....

[National Velvet] is the story of a girl of fourteen with a passion for horses who obtains in a shilling raffle a piebald gelding, with which she wins the Grand National, owner up. This super-daydream is the skeleton of the book, its flesh is enormously English humour about children, animals and the lower middle classes. I cannot imagine a more repulsive recipe for a novel—and the result is one of the jolliest, raciest, books I have read in years. Miss Bagnold, except in one or two purplish passages,...

["National Velvet"] is a book that is rich with life that has been lived amply and with gracious easiness and that has eventually spilled over irresistibly into art. You may speak of it as escape literature if you like, for it in no way impinges on the problems that are tearing the heart of today's humanity; but it will be more fittingly thought of as a reminder of those eternal human amenities that invariably survive political and social cataclysms…. The book abounds in wit and ...