Books: Kind Lady

COLLECTED IMPRESSIONS (269 pp.) —Elizabeth Bowen—Knopf ($3.50).

Elizabeth Bowen is a fine novelist, as she proved in her To the North and The Death of the Heart; but she has written some very poor book reviews. Kindness of heart that does her credit as a woman sometimes blinkers her as a critic. Many of these Collected Impressions are reprinted reviews recording her pleasure with some very ordinary books, and they will explain why her British fellow authors wait eagerly for her notices of their work. It is rarely that she lets anything pass without a kind word, quotable on a book jacket.

Yet...