[The Garnett Family] has some respectable qualities: it is clearly written and commonsensically planned; it is almost entirely free from those intrusions of the author's personality which mar many social biographies; it is not wrested into a strange shape so as to body out a proud thesis. Miss Heilbrun has pursued her facts patiently and, so far as I can judge, scrupulously; her book can hardly help being very interesting.

For all that, it is a slight book and lacks the texture its subject demands. It is difficult to understand how anyone could have gathered so many interesting details without being driven to attempt wider, deeper and more intricate connections….

The individualist aesthetic, the intense personal responsibility, the sometimes arrogant anti-vulgarity, the reaction from bourgeois conventionalism—all are parts of that complex of attitudes which a book about the Garnetts should not fail to examine. Unfortunately, Miss Heilbrun...