Quartet

Abstract

The sketches in The Left Bank and Other Stories represented an apprenticeship completed and an initial impulse fulfilled. The author had learned from Ford Madox Ford the idiom in which modern fiction was to be rendered effectively, and how personal experience could be transmuted into the subject matter of art. Her intuitive sense of form gave several of these short stories originality, centrality of focus, and unity of theme. The novel, however, creates enlarged and different demands; it is a genre more complex, more sustained and, if it permits less refinement, it also calls for a more substantial rendering of character and a more amplified definition of experience.