The author has done nothing that will appeal more strongly to adults than this study of New England village life. There is not a character that is not rich in individuality.
The plot of the story is so slight as to be almost invisible.
In "Honeycomb" Dorothy M. Richardson continues the story of Miriam [begun and carried on in "Pointed Roofs," and "Backwater."] and the fourth and volume ‘The Tunnel,’ is in preparation as an eBook edition.
Miriam has been engaged as governess by some wealthy people in the country, and after her life in the suburban home and in the schools where she taught, she much enjoys the luxury. The spring comes into the rooms. and fills her blood. She responds to the beauty and comfort of a well-managed house. But the restless, critical creature, ever on the search for what is real, soon becomes dissatisfied. The people who live this sort of life are all keeping up a pretense. They are not alive, but dead. Instead of living, they are all playing a game, combining in a conspiracy to shut out truth and nature.
Miriam, testing all things and people by that self of which she is always intensely and securely conscious. sees them all as shams. There is no resting-place among them for this lonely soul, mistrustful of all except the self that she knows and trusts.
The particular idiom and vision of this writer are the same as those of the makers of imagist verse.... But "Honeycomb" is not verse masquerading as a novel. It is an honest narrative, searching, living -- fantastic only to those who cannot feel these very modern ways of looking at the world. It very well may be that so completely feminine a novel has ever been written.
Written in a rapid succession of jerks and gasps, with words and stops and fragment of sentences shaken, one might fancy, out of a pepper-pot -- the breathless words of someone who has run a mile to deliver some exciting news -- the book succeeds, through the author's intensity of feeling and thought, in conveying (in defiance of all the laws of good writing) a clear impression of the girl and of the society at Newlands.
