Sylvia Townsend Warner Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jane Spence Southron

Critical Essay by Jane Spence Southron

SOURCE: "Catabasis," in The New York Times Book Review, October 20, 1940, p. 24.

In the following review, Southron claims that in The Cat's Cradle Warner is "at her most beguiling best. "

"Our unhappiness transcended our egoism, and by degrees by a complicated process of advances and withdrawals, exchange of looks, fusion of silences, we fell deeply in love with each other. After that she lived with me . . . and now my whole life was transfigured, full of entertainment and delight. . . . Naturally, there was a good deal of talk about it—embassies always gossip." Which tells the story.

To begin with, you could hardly fail, even were no name attached, to recognize the writer. And, to proceed, the love affair was on the plane where the infrequent literary-human Alices meet in gentle, far too rare felicity; one party to the blissful, amorous interlude being...
(read more)