Like many another woman writer excessively drawn to the kind (and unkind) hearts and coronets scene—or to its American counterpart—Pearl Sydenstricker Buck escaped downright badness only by a hairsbreadth…. Certainly, it's hard now to conceive Miss Buck trawling in a Nobel Prize—and for literature at that—even as a Buggin's Turn candidate in a lean year. [The Woman Who Was Changed, the] latest collection from under the belt of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation Inc.—only two of its tales have been published before—confirms once again a talent that's agreeable but markedly striated with flaws.

Five of these stories, for instance, enjoy happy arrangements at their endings. Emphatic endings are, of course, the formal prerogative of short stories. With so generally scanty a middle to go on with, even in a nouvelle-length piece like Miss Buck's title story, short fictions inevitably press rather hard...