SOURCE: "The Short Stories," in "Sylvia Townsend Warner 1893-1978: A Celebration," edited by Claire Harman, in PN Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1981, p. 45.

In the following essay, Cavaliero lauds Warner's literary skill and "ability to celebrate the singular without declining into singularity. "

Sylvia Townsend Warner may have been neglected by the critics, but her work was not unread. For over forty years her short stories appeared in The New Yorker, giving her a world-wide reputation; over one hundred and fifty of them appeared in published collections. Clearly she found them an appropriate medium for her gifts.

Those gifts included a talent for the telling phrase; similes that illuminated and did not distract; an eye for strangeness and incongruity; a detailed knowledge of the practicalities of daily life; the power to generalise informatively, an apparent inability to waste words, and a tart, unjudging awareness of the quirks and perversities of human...