SOURCE: "Humor and Irony," in Commonweal, Vol. LXIV, No. 1, April 6, 1956, pp. 33-4.

In the following review, Rainer acknowledges Warner's technical skills but finds Winter in the Air, and Other Stories lacking in imagination.

A great deal has happened to both literary taste and to Miss Warner's talent since 1926 when her Lolly Willowes was the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Not only have standards for the minor novelist fallen into a grave decline, and Gresham's Law seen them give way to the sentimentality of Rumer Godden or the pretentious trash of Wouk, but the exciting experimentation or relative daring of writers has, with little exception, been self-expurgated during the last couple of decades, so that their current work or the work of their successors seems archaic and stratified. It has not been a glorious road from Lolly Willowes to Winter in the Air.

Certainly by her earlier standards this collection...