Bawer is an American literary critic. In the following essay, he analyzes several of Jhabvala's novels, including The Householder, Travelers, and Heat and Dust, commending her more recent works for including American characters, while criticizing them for their preoccupation with Westerners who try to become Indians.

In the following essay, Lenta compares and contrasts Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Jhabvala's Heat and Dust in an effort to expound Michael Echeruo's notion of “literatures which were originally conceived of in tribal contexts that have now become international and cross-cultural.”

In the following essay, Rubin categorizes Jhabvala not as an Indian novelist, but as an "Indo-Anglian" novelist in the tradition of R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao.

Newman is a British educator, editor, and critic. In the following essay, she discusses the Gothic elements of Three Continents and its main character, the multi-national murderer Crishi, who resembles the real-life serial killer Charles Sobhraj.

In the following essay, Williams discusses several of Jhabvala's novels, focusing on her sense of satire and irony and illustrating how her depiction of middle-class life subtly addresses various social and religious issues in India.

In the following essay, Summerfield discusses critics' frequent comparisons of Jhabvala to Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov, concentrating on her frequent depictions of swamis and their relationships to their female followers.

Mr. Khushwant Singh in bracketing Mrs. R. Prawer Jhabvala with Mr. R. K. Narayan as the leading Indian novelists now writing in English has suggested that she writes in the main about the "Babbitts" of Delhi. It would be a gross generalization to speak of "Babbittry" as Jhabvala's preoccupation although at least two of her six novels (Get Ready for Battle and The Nature of Passion) explore in depth the lives of the rich and corrupt bourgeoisie of present-day India, while s...

In the following essay, Urstad examines Jhabvala's short story “Rose Petals,” focusing on Jhabvala's creation of sympathetically drawn characters who live isolated, privileged lives.

In the following essay, Agarwal discusses the stories of Olivia and her granddaughter in Heat and Dust, proposing that their tragic fates in India are due to their "liberalism and sensitivity."

Gooneratne is a Ceylonese-born critic, poet, and educator. In the following essay, she examines Jhabvala's novel In Search of Love and Beauty, which she contends concerns itself more with Western culture than Jhabvala's previous novels.

In the following essay, Dudt examines four of Jhabvala's novels—Amrita, Esmond in India, Travelers, and Heat and Dust—and discusses the ways in which her views of India have changed over the course of her writing.

In the following interview, which was conducted in New York in 1986, Jhabvala discusses her screenplays and her novel In Search of Love and Beauty, which she considers her first American novel, having written it after moving to New York City.

Writing for the cinema allows Mrs. Jhabvala to reach a far larger audience than she could ever have thought it possible (before 1975) to reach with her novels and stories. A concern to strip life of its illusions seems to motivate her films and fiction alike during the period under review [1960–1976], and it is evident that she often works out in her films ideas that run as major themes through her fiction. Asked in 1975 to comment on the influence of film-making on her writing of fiction, she referr...

Fitzgerald is a British novelist and biographer. In the following review of Poet and Dancer, which she calls "the saddest of Jhabvala's books," Fitzgerald discusses the strained relationship between the two main characters, Lara and Angel.

Stead is a poet, fiction writer, and critic from New Zealand. In the following review of Shards of Memory, he suggests that when Jhabvala does not attempt "to represent India truthfully, accurately, in all its complexity," her novels, like this one, lack energy and focus.

In the following essay, Usha provides an in-depth analysis of Jhabvala's short story “The Widow.”

The achievement of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as a literary artist is distinctive, yet limited at the same time; distinctive, because she has cultivated and demonstrated the qualities of a literary artist which are her own and emerge naturally from a social and cultural milieu peculiar to herself. But her distinction is modified and narrowed by the rather limited quality of her literary achievement, which is partly the inevitable result of her choice, and partly the artistic outcome of her creativity. This peculi...

In the following review, Curtis offers a lukewarm assessment of Jhabvala's East into Upper East, claiming that “no new ground” is covered.

In the following review, Alleva criticizes Jhabvala's screenplay Jefferson in Paris, claiming that the film is “buried under research.”

Gray is a Polish-born American journalist, novelist, and critic. In the following negative review of Poet and Dancer, she laments the absence of the "talismanic force of the subcontinent" that energized her previous novels.

In the following review, Glazebrook presents a positive appraisal of East into Upper East.

In the following review, Kakutani offers a mixed assessment of Poet and Dancer, praising Jhabvala's ability to write with “fluency and poise” but noting a vague dissatisfaction in the “predictable” ending.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's stories have been compared to Chekhov's. She is a detached observer of what he called morbus fraudulentus, the comedy (in the sternest sense) of self-delusion which leaves us to make up our minds. Her novel A New Dominion embodies this irony, but one is more struck, this time, by the echoes of A Passage to India. Two generations have passed since Forster. The Westerner is not now in India to rule or give…. But, allowing for this difference, Forster's and Mr...

In the following review of Poet and Dancer, Messud claims that Jhabvala's depiction of New York City is less compelling than her portrayals of India in her previous works, and ultimately regards the novel as a failure for its inability to persuade the reader to care about its tragic characters.

[There] is a monotonous sameness in [Jhabvala's] writing: in the kinds of characters chosen, the angles from which they are observed. More important, there is no progress towards a deepening of insights about the social forces at work in [India], no striving to understand these. Indeed, the writer shows no inclination whatsoever even to attempt to go beyond the facile emotional reactions to what she observes on the Indian social scene. (p. 219) [The kind of characters who inhabit the Jhabvala world a...

In the following review, Rubin offers a positive assessment of ten of Jhabvala's novels rereleased by Simon & Schuster.

In the following mixed review of Shards of Memory, Rauch calls the complex relationships of the novel part of a "paradox that … lacks depth."

Though she was born in Germany of Polish Jewish parents and has until now located her fiction in India, where she lived for many years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has always seemed, in temperament and practice, to be a British novelist of a very distinct kind. Such a novelist (usually, but not invariably, female) is notable for her ability to deal firmly with any amount of nonsense from her characters. She instantly sees through their little games, laughs at their pretensions and calls them to order when they ste...

In the following essay, Jhabvala comments on the reciprocal relationship between writing novels and screenplays.

The title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's new novel, "In Search of Love and Beauty" … evokes that of Proust's great opus concerning the search for lost time, and much else about the novel is Proustian: its aristocratic milieu, where there is always enough money to finance romance; its multi-generational scope; its free movements back and forth in time; its frequent scenes of sexual spying; its interest in Jewishness and homosexuality as modes of estrangement; and its insistent m...

Travelling people, moody, self-absorbed people shopping round for a friend or a lover or a guru, form the motley cast of R. Prawer Jhabvala's [A New Dominion]. She lets them loose to test their trite identities ("Gopi the gay and gallant groom", "Margaret hates modern materialism") against an Indian culture that returns a mocking echo to every question. If they find what they are looking for, perhaps that is only because India is so hybrid, so vast, so obligingly ambiguous...

There are three novels in [A New Dominion], Mrs. Jhabvala's latest tour of the Indian horizon, two of them excellent and the third interesting enough in all conscience. She dances between them in little sketches each with its headline calculated to produce the embarrassing faux-naif effect which one remembers from earlier attempts to introduce us to the charms of undeveloped philosophy…. The first novel concerns two English girls who come to India seeking self-fulfilment. They join the ashram ...

Having come to New York in the 1930s, a refugee from Austria, Leo Kellermann [in In Search of Love and Beauty] establishes himself as a 'psycho-spiritual therapist': a Bacchus figure in a monk's robe 'girdled by a studded cowboy belt'. Aside from collecting the pupils and disciples he collects, he is also the pivot around which turn the lives of three generations (the story spans half a century) of an émigré New York family whose matriarch, Louise, 'ad...

The following review offers a positive assessment of East into Upper East, claiming Jhabvala's collection is “rich in character, observation, and insight.”

R. Prawer Jhabvala's first novel, "Amrita" [published in Britain as "To Whom She Will"], is an amusing, slightly caustic comedy, as genuinely Indian as any tale of village suffering, but dealing with aspects of Indian society that have received little attention. Mrs. Jhabvala sets her story in post-independence New Delhi, and this gives her an excellent opportunity to describe some of the many levels of Indian urban life and to explore with an entertaining detachment some ...

[Mrs. Jhabvala, in A Backward Place,] has not the sustained brilliance that Jane Austen often rises to; and she cannot quite manage that astonishing bite and attack. All the same her many excellent qualities are nearly all Austenish ones, and they make her a most interesting and satisfactory writer. Mrs. Jhabvala can supply one ingredient quite outside Jane Austen's repertoire: an exotic, colourful background which she touches in with swift, sure strokes….

The author of "Amrita," R. Prawer Jhabvala, who has been widely compared in the British press to Jane Austen, has written a fresh and witty novel about modern India. It is not necessary to know anything about the customs and habits of the mixed population of India's capital city, New Delhi—the setting of Mrs. Jhabvala's lively comedy of manners—to enjoy her ironic Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 1927– Fay Godwin's Photo Files