[3] The following year, she edited an anthology of recent poetry, Songs for Sale, which one critic found to be generally unadventurous and too indebted to Britain's poet laureate, Robert Bridges, although one of Jones's own poems was singled out as a happy exception.
The New York Bookman reviewer John Macy thought her nom de plume too unmemorable for lasting fame: "Why does she not assume one that will instantly identify her in contemporaneous memory?"
[7] Jones moved in Cambridge and London literary circles, associating with the Bloomsbury Group[8][9][10] (Virginia Woolf admired "her spruce shining mind"[11]) and corresponding with writers Dorothy Richardson, Lytton Strachey,[12] and Steven Runciman,[13] among others.
She not only practised seriously at the piano; she spouted roulades in her bath; she stood about at open windows, on landings, in passages, her hands held down together before her as if she were a puppet, or clasped behind her as if she were a child in a dame's school, singing away like mad.
She sang at meals; every night, as they trouped upstairs to bed, with a curious family unanimity, Mrs Cunningham had to repeat: "Hush, Aswell, the servants!"
Quiet Interior is set during the War, the plot revolving around the relationship between two sisters, Claire and Pauline Norris, and their romantic entanglement with a man named Clement.
The Wedgwood Medallion moves on from the War, focusing on an engaged couple who discover their incompatibility, triggering events that draw in their families and friends.
"Clement reminds me a little," Hilary presently went on, in a voice as nearly approaching the softly reminiscent as she could attain, "of such a nice man I knew in Simla: a Captain Everard.
"[32] Their older step-sister Hilary, 23, returns from a long stay in Russia, worldly and insensitive; she is struck by Pauline's beauty and immediately starts plotting a 'good' marriage for her.
Visiting Clement in a war-hospital, Claire reflects: These men were, or had lately been, in pain; they had struggled in hell, and no stillness and peace, comfort and security, flowers or sunlight, could ever quite atone.
[33]Set in upper middle-class Kensington and rural Derbyshire in 1920, the novel centres on the family of Sir Harold Peel ('Hal'), who appears stolid and sensible to his children but conceals from them his addiction to risk-taking on the stock-market.
Lady Peel (Leila) appears silly and superficial to her children, concealing from them a core of wisdom born of Victorian thwarted love and marital compromise.
At the height of the Peels' superiority, and to the children's horror, Hal's financial affairs crash, sending the family plunging economically into the lower middle class.
The novel comes to focus on Caroline, who, stricken by the War, learns to live and love again thanks to the example of Roden and Grace, to the confession of her mother Leila, who confides to her the story of her youthful suffering, and to the kindliness of her dead fiancé's brother, Hugh Sexton, who was gassed in the trenches.
To smite or to draw him into passion a woman would have to combine Caroline's delicacy of touch and fineness of perception with courage, enthusiasm, and a bolder outlook.
Nicholas Watergate, 28, war veteran and son of a famous Victorian artist, is holidaying with his two brothers and a friend, Oliver, 24, near Tintagel, without women.
He is gradually drawn to Henrietta, however, by his interest in Bill's paintings, and then by her qualities – courage, good sense, humour, sensitivity, intellectual honesty.
She shows understanding and sympathy when Inigo tells her about Charles and Jocelyn: "An immense relief came to him, as though he were thus made once more a member of a beloved community – exile at an end".
[41] Inigo and Henrietta are quietly happy in their last months together, close to nature, days made poignant by their knowledge of her impending end.
Felicia is torn: afraid of losing Helen but struck by Conrad, who is rich, handsome, wise, kind – and who drives a long sleek powerful motor car.
[43] She generously absents herself, and in the interval, in a passage of great beauty and delicate symbolism (the setting is summer), Conrad takes Felicia's virginity.
Returning from work, Cedric Benton (ex-Harrow and Cambridge) contemplates his wife's light, spacious, tastefully-decorated house in Hampstead.
Bride's brother Johnnie, 26, falls under Anthea's spell and starts inviting her out, but his proposal of marriage disappoints her: she wants an affair.
She is puzzled, however, by Bride, wondering how a person who appears to be so uninteresting can "produce in her surroundings an effect so satisfying: it was strange that dullness and evasion should translate themselves into order, serenity and formal beauty".
Feeling guilty and needing someone to talk to, she writes to Cedric, who makes some excuse to Bride, cuts short his holiday in France, and motors to Yorkshire.
The novels are notable for their subtle presentation of (often failing) love-relationships among the cultivated middle class, for their frank 'Cambridge-salon' type dialogue,[47] and for their sensitive evocations of English settings.
"Inigo Sandys is refined to the point of attenuation," remarked Isabel Paterson, "subtle, but quite un-complex; a subtlety achieved by the most drastic eliminations.
"[50] "She has a beautiful visual gift," wrote Rebecca West in the New Statesman of Quiet Interior (1920), "and a sense of character that can be brilliant or touching.
[53] The Cambridge Review found in The Wedgwood Medallion (1923) "all the qualities which an earlier generation associates with George Eliot";[54] The New York Times declared of this novel that "Miss Jones assuredly deserves classification with Sheila Kaye-Smith and Katherine Mansfield".
[55] "Jones is no end clever and adroit in her phrasing," wrote New York Bookman reviewer, John Macy, of Helen and Felicia (1927).