SOURCE: A review of The Innocent and the Guilty, in The Saturday Review (New York), Vol. 54, No. 18, May 1, 1971, pp. 41-2.

In the following excerpt, Long comments on the "sophistication" and "imagination" of Warner's stories in The Innocent and the Guilty.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, who is now in her late seventies, has had a long, distinguished career. Her stories practically glisten with craftsmanship, and her imagination has a quality of urbanity that is present in all the tales in The Innocent and the Guilty, regardless of how different the scenes and characters are.

In "The Perfect Setting" Miss Warner has an opportunity for satire on manners and social types. To the garden of the late poet Oswald Corbett come a number of admirers, including Mrs. Bugler, who has gone through Corbett's manuscripts examining every watermark; Father Garment, S. J., who has discovered a latent Catholicism in Corbett's "Three Odes...