The Camberwell Beauty and Other Stories

Penelope Mortimer in the New York Times identifies Pritchett's "minor literary genre" represented in the volume and its perennial cast of characters and themes: "[S]eedy antique dealers and Sunday sailors, adulterous academics, a confused editor of a leftwing periodical, an unlikely film director, lonely people with dogs; old age and remembered childhood."^[6]

Times literary critic Anatole Eroyard contends that Pritchett has "given up exploring motives and illustrating characters as being too simple, unworthy of the name of art" and, as such, the characters remain largely an unsolved "mystery." Eroyard writes:

Whether these stories "succeed" or not, most of them are "readable" at the very least. Perhaps this readability derives from their "mystery"—even if we never come to understand it.^[7]

He adds: "The stories give you a few clues and the rest is up to you."^[8]

Novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty in the New York Times offered this assessment of the collection:

Each story's truth is distilled by Pritchett through a pure concentration of human character...The paradoxes, the stratagems, the escapes, the entanglements, the humors and dreams, are all projections of the individual human being, all by himself alone. In its essence, Pritchett's work, so close to fantasy, is deeply true to life.^[9]

• Eroyard, Anatole. 1974. :Books of the Times. THE CAMBERWELL BEAUTY". New York Times, September 16, 1974. Accessed 15
• Mortimer, Penelope. 1974. "The Camberwell Beauty." New York Times, September 15, 1974. Retrieved March 2, 2024.
• Stinson, John J. 1992. V. S. Pritchett: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, New York. Gordon Weaver, General Editor. ISBN 0-8057-8341-5
• Treglown, Jeremy. 2004. V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life. Pimlico-Random House, London. ISBN 0-7126-9725-X (paperback).
• Welty, Eudora. 1978. "A Family of Emotion." New York Times, June 25, 1978. Retrieved March 1, 2024.