...in his new novel, "Open Country," which has just been published, Mr. Hewlett tells far more fully and satisfyingly of the growth and development of Senhouse's character and theories, and how, in the course of his wanderings, he met with Sanchia Percival under circumstances delightfully characteristic of them both and of what happened thereafter. "Senhouse," he says, "had theories about everything in nature and society, and practiced more of them than you would have thought possible." He was, when we first meet him, "a confirmed wanderer, a sojourner in tents, as much artist, scribbler, desultory scholar as ever, but with a new taste, a taste for botany, which became later on the ruling passion of his life. He was more charming and ridiculous than ever, and mentally entirely naked and entirely unashamed."
There are many other people in the story, some members of a highly respectable English family of the upper middle class, and other people of other classes, all, lightly as they are touched on, vivid and living personalities. Many things happen to Senhouse and Sanchia and the others, things both amusing and dramatic, but, through all the story, Senhouse's ideas of life and living, his brilliant and fascinating discussions of the seen and unseen, give to the book a pervading charm of poetry and of the out-of-doors that makes it altogether exceptional in modern literature.
–The Book Buyer: A Monthly Review of American and Foreign Literature [1909]
