A Party for the Girls

Fiction by H. E. Bates

The six long stories of A Party for the Girls present H.E. Bates at his finest. A crack shot at understated tragedy, Bates is perhaps at his best with comedy and character––consider the opening line of the title story: “Miss Tompkins, who was seventy-six, bright pink-looking in a bath-salts sort of way and full of an alert but dithering energy, looked out the drawing-room window for the twentieth time since breakfast and found herself growing increasingly excited.…
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If we set H. E. Bates’s best tales against the best of Chekhov’s, I do not believe it would be possible, with any conviction, to argue that the Russian was the finer artist.
—Graham Greene
He was without an equal in England in the kind of story he had made his own.
—London Times
He is the Renoir of the typewriter.
—Punch
His tales have… a real vitality, a kind of sunlit vivacity of phrase and incident, which gives brightness to stories even of relatively sombre themes… He can mingle comedy and emotion with a fine balance. He is always sensitive, often tender, and has a fine detachment in narrative and power of complete evocation in description.
—London Times
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