SOURCE: Howard, Richard. “The Wise Woman of Dorset.” Nation 236 (19 March 1983): 343-45.

In the following review, Howard provides a positive review of Warner's collected letters and poetry and addresses the lack of critical attention to her oeuvre.

She has no critical cachet whatever, this writer. Her fifteen volumes of fiction are not examined in studies of the modern English novel—even Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927) fails to appear in bibliographies of gay writing, though it is, with Stein's Things As They Are, the most passionate homosexual novel I know. She is not “taught,” and I have never heard her mentioned on those occasions when poets are “ranked.” Women's studies have neglected her, too, though her status among the serenely Sapphic householders is irreproachable: whenever she and Valentine Ackland were separated, William Maxwell tells us in his tactful but explicit introduction, they wrote each other at the beginning and end of...