There is nothing of the fantastic in Pamela Hansford Johnson. The Survival of the Fittest is wholesome and sustaining and dramatically un-American. It describes the lives of a group of friends, all of them in or close to 'the literary world', during the 1930s, the war years, and, briefly, up to the Sixties…. [They] become entangled with one another in various love-affairs and animosities, marry unexpectedly, or divorce, or fail to marry; come to tragic ends, or flourish in middle-aged prosperity beneath the apple-trees in Sussex. Technically, the book is impeccable—except for one disruptively high-pitched excursus to the Russian steppes, where the real writer of the group dies dramatically in picturesque surroundings. The book's quiet, even tone, though monotonous, allows for a certain cumulative strength, and there are places where the very usualness of the human cycle of grief and reconciliation gives dignity and feeling to the...