SOURCE: "The Not So Little People," in The Times Literary Supplement, January 14, 1977, p. 25.

In this review, Annan describes Warner's prose as "poetic and . . . mystical. "

What is named on the label is found in the jar: [the stories in Kingdoms of Elfin] really are fairy stories and fourteen of the sixteen have appeared in The New Yorker where they must have glittered with a strange unearthly light among the wife-swappings on Martha's Vineyard, the examinations of social diseases, and the advertisements for Bergdorf Goodman. The elfin kingdoms over or underlie (mostly under, because they tend to be subterranean) Europe, and their inhabitants share the traditionally accepted characteristics of their human counterparts. Thus the elfins of the Kingdom of Wirre Gedanken in the Harz Mountains are given to metaphysical speculation; on the English side of the Scottish border the fairies are comparatively uncouth and deplorably indifferent to physical comfort; in...