In The Philistines, Pamela Hansford Johnson tells the story of a young woman who, on impulse, marries into surroundings not her own. Despite the boredom of the surburban world in which she finds herself, she remains content with life until, during the war, she falls in love. And though her love affair offers no more complete satisfaction than her marriage; though the great passion of her life is, in fact, a one-sided one; she tolerates this as she tolerated the drabness of her married life. The Philistines is a subtle and penetrating study of a lively, witty woman of energetic mind who found in a shadow what she could not find in substance; a woman whose own resilience prevents her troubles from growing into the tragedy by which a lesser woman might have been engulfed.