PositiveThe Paris ReviewPavlova excels in the topography of social relations: who sits near whom and who walks with whom determine whole years of a character’s life. The breaking of a blossom or closing of the latch on a jeweled bracelet symbolizes a future life broken or encircled ... Pavlova, as unabashedly as any of the nineteenth-century male writers that were her contemporaries, makes clear in her fiction her own preferences and values in life. Thus, the novel’s attitude toward poetry is the measure of the society of the novel. When a poet suffers and is ridiculed, society is condemned ... Pavlova possesses a romanticism that is characteristic of her time but mixed with an ironic sense of reality ... The strength of this novel, as of Pavlova’s view of life, is that both merge these romantic concepts into an ultimately clear realism. The countless ironic touches...prevent the reader from becoming too lost in the enjoyment of the details of how rich aristocrats live. Similarly, as much as we could wish a happier ending for Cecily, Pavlova leaves her, and us, with the one weapon against life that does not destroy life: consciousness. The double awareness that this is the way things are and ought not to be, and the high quality of Pavlova’s narrative and poetic style, are themselves a vivid protest against the destiny of women.
