SOURCE: "Throw Them Overboard!" in Novels and Novelists, Knopf, 1930, pp. 246-48.

In this review, Mansfield, a highly respected writer and literary critic, cautiously praises Forster's "Story of the Siren" for its sensibility and humor, but notes that he does not entirely commit his imagination to his writing.

The delightful event of a new story by Mr. E. M. Forster sets us wishing that it had not been so long to wait between his last novel and his new book. He is one of the very few younger English writers whose gifts are of a kind to compel our curiosity as well as our admiration. There is in all his novels a very delicate sense of the value of atmosphere, a fine precision of expression, and his appreciation of the uniqueness of the characters he portrays awakens in him a kind of special humour, half whimsical, half sympathetic. It...