The Key to My Heart
The Key to My Heart: A Comedy in Three Parts is a collection of three works of short fiction by V. S. Pritchett, first published by Chatto House in 1963 and repackaged as a novel by Random House in 1964. The stories originally appeared in The New Yorker. The first of the stories, "The Key to My Heart", was selected by the BBC for radio dramatization in 1971.
Stories
- "The Key to My Heart" The New Yorker, July 18, 1959
- "Noisy Flushes the Bird's" The New Yorker, September 23, 1961
- "Noisy in the Doghouse" The New Yorker, November 10, 1962
Background
The Key to My Heart draws from Pritchett's family and community life while residing at Stokke Manor in the Savernake Forest, as well as an examination of "the effects of class consciousness on English behavior."Contemporary reviews
Critic Frederick C. Crews, writing in the New York Times Book Review, offers a thumb-nail synopsis-analysis of the story:Crews surmises that the novel's title, reminiscent of the fiction from the period of Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, is a measure of Pritchett's "indifference to the charge of sounding old-fashioned." He asks rhetorically "whether this pleasant and breezy tale has any serious claim to our interest."
Novelist Brigid Brophy in the New Statesman "dismissed" the cast of characters in the novel as resembling "the quaintness of people in Happy families" playing cards. The comedic narrative, she wrote, "was of the Ealing Studios kind."
Retrospective appraisal
Literary critic John J. Stinson bestows high praise on The Key to My Heart:American literary critic Edmund Wilson considered the collection "a comic masterpiece as well as an acute tableau de moeurs."
Biographer Jeremy Treglown regards these stories as a brief falling off in the quality of Pritchett's fiction: "The work Pritchett did in the mid-1960s was never without confidence or panache...but not until 1968-69 did his fiction begin to return to form."
Prtichett, in a 1985 interview with John Haffenden, remarked: