How long have unmarried British females in their thirties suffered from stifling family relationships and anemic love affairs? Is it only since World War I slaughtered thousands of potential husbands? Or does it go further back, to Victorian papas a là Mr. Barrett, and fiancés dead of fever on the North West Frontier?

Celia Baird, the heroine of Pamela Hansford Johnson's new novel [The Sea and the Wedding], is one of the most convincing, as she is one of the most pathetically repellent, of the whole genre. She has achieved, indeed, a semi-escape from it. That is, though she spends week-ends with Mummy and Daddy at a gruesome seaside hotel, she occupies a flat in London during the middle of the week, runs a typing bureau and has a lover. Yet it is only too evident, as she stalks through these pages of understated prose, jangling her...