New York Mosaic

Mary Britton Miller was in her sixties when she published the first of these collected novels under the name Isabel Bolton. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker ("She has cut to roundness and smoothed to convexity a little crystal of literary form that concentrates the light like a burning glass ... ") and by Diana Trilling, who also wrote of Bolton with the publication of her next novel, The Christmas Tree, "... she is the best woman writer of fiction in this country today". Despite such praise, Bolton had all but disappeared from the literary landscape by the time of her death in 1975. With the reissue of these novels her work is once again getting the attention of serious critics (Vivian Gornick in the Los Angeles Times, Gore Vidal in The New York Review of Books, and Margo Jefferson in the New York Times). All three novels are set in New York City, the place itself becoming a character in Bolton's hands. "The timeless insight of her work can be savored again ... The lives revealed are as genuine and complex as the city they are enveloped in is resplendent and evanescent" (Kirkus Reviews).