The Wooden Shepherdess is the second instalment of Richard Hughes's long historical novel, The Human Predicament, of which the first volume, The Fox in the Attic, was published in 1961. So long a gap in publication presents the reader with its own difficulties, particularly as The Human Predicament is designed, Mr Hughes tells us, as a single continuous novel, and not as a trilogy or a quartet…. The most a reviewer can do, therefore, in considering the present volume, is to report progress, ra...

[Richard Hughes] is anything but a flashy writer, and I must confess that I am mildly put off by his style. This, however, is only a matter of taste, and whatever polish his prose may lack is vastly compensated for by the certainty of his vision. (pp. 142-43) Readers of The Fox in the Attic, the first novel in Hughes's projected trilogy, will encounter many of the characters they met there in The Wooden Shepherdess. The early sequences of this novel occur in the United States in the 1920s…. Hu...

[Upon publication of the first volume of The Human Predicament, titled The Fox in the Attic, Richard Hughes] was called a genius, compared to Tolstoy and generally treated as a great modern novelist who had set out to produce the great English novel of the decade. There are many things in the world I will never understand; this response is one of them…. The book maddeningly jumped from one scene, character, country to another, trying to appear big and vast; moved, despite the constant shifting, at a ...