Anyone reading through my press-cuttings book would believe the novel had had a great critical success and a great commercial one... But the fact remains that [I] have been bitterly disappointed; and the weeks which followed publication were amongst the most unhappy in my life.
The book's popularity confirmed her greatest fear: that, for all her effort, it would be received not as a literary work but as middlebrow. The critics who mattered had passed it over as lightweight and unimportant.
The cultural conflict that defined its reception-between 'lightweight and unimportant' middlebrow writing and the highbrow literary fiction that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s-is one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself.
Beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit, as well as an affecting portrait of the artist as a young girl.