The late Miss Warner, whose more than half century of brilliantly varied and superbly self-possessed literary production never won her the flaming place in the heavens of reputation that she deserved, began as a poet … [and retained] magic and music in her prose. Her last book … was a series of vivacious matter-of-fact short stories about elves, collected a year before her death as "Kingdoms of Elfin."… Her first novel ["Lolly Willowes"] finds her already moving with sombre confidence into the realm of the supernatural, which she treats as a comfortable branch of the mundane. Her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it. (p. 99)

[In "Lolly Willowes" there is] an identification of the witch with Nature. Sylvia Townsend Warner was a great friend of Nature; she was one of the last bardic intimates of rural England and a witty, erudite explicator of those myths and...