Hard Romance
Barbara Everett, 8 February 1996
“... it. Her art becomes recognisable when her crisply social novels take on a formidable and elusive power of suggestion: the prosaic grew poetic in them, and the poetic grew hard. The chief medium for these continual transactions of inner and outer was her vital irony. When Jane Austen said that she depended on her readers’ ingenuity, she meant something not ... ”