“As his art approaches its maturity, he adds to his native wit and cleverness a sure mastery of technique which puts him unmistakably in the forefront of the English novelists of the day. So clever and interesting is Mr Mackenzie’s new novel that one regrets the more to find, if anything, an increase in the smart nastiness that occasionally blemishes his writing.” Stanley Went
+ − N Y Evening Post p3 S 25 ’20 1500w N Y Times p18 S 19 ’20 700w
“Mr Mackenzie handles it all in exactly the right spirit, never mawkish and never brutal. He is satirical, but not youthfully cynical. Although I think his clock struck twelve with the novel called ‘Sylvia Scarlett,’ I wish that he may live a hundred years and go on writing novels about every one of the Vanity chorus.” E. L. Pearson
+ Review 3:269 S 29 ’20 160w
“For the reader, unless he likes flippancy and fireworks for their own sakes, the end of it all is not much better than vanity. Mr Mackenzie, at least, is a story-teller of a sort. However encumbered with facts, his narrative always has the charm of an adventure which, if it never quite gets anywhere, is at least always amusingly on its way.” H. W. Boynton
+ − Review 3:296 O 6 ’20 450w
“That this plebeian girl should step into her exalted social station and so speedily absorb the new life and arouse love and veneration for the Clarehaven tradition and inheritance is little short of a miracle. But Mr Mackenzie makes it seem natural.”
+ Springf’d Republican p9a D 5 ’20 470w
“Mr Compton Mackenzie will receive praise for this new novel from those to whom it was chiefly intended to appeal; it will receive adverse criticism from those whose judgment Mr Mackenzie has by now, perhaps, ceased to take into account. It will have earned the one and thoroughly deserved the other. Deliberately he has written a story of a snob for snobs.”
− The Times [London] Lit Sup p283 My 6 ’20 720w