NOW HERE'S A puzzle: Why has this novel received so few - hardly any - reviews? It is a pleasure to read, written with an easy, -unaffected elegance, the fourth novel of a gifted writer whose disconcerting power of observation manifests itself in shrewdness and wit: qualities which are not brandished, but which lease all the more for the unexpectedness with which they keep peeping out from under a quiet manner.

Has it been neglected because the framework of its plot is an ancient one which has frequently been used by inferior writers: the Cinderella story? Absurd, if so, since that same framework has supported some of the best novels ever written, June Eyre for one, Persuasion for another. How it