Coppard, A. E. - Punch (essay date 1944)
Punch (essay date 1944)
SOURCE: "Variations on an English Theme," in Punch, Vol. 206, No. 5382, March 29, 1944, p. 276.
[In the following review of the collection Ugly Anna and Other Tales, the critic admires Coppard's rendering of rural England.]
A. E. Coppard once wrote a story about a gentleman, a cook and a musical box. The musical box started to play, and for no particular reason the gentleman who had lived so staidly and respectably for years held out his hands to the cook and started waltzing round and round, down the steps and into the beyond. This story, with its troubling behaviour on the part of ordinary people, contains in miniature the genius of Coppard—freakish, tender, oddly penetrating, much imitated but inimitable. His new collection, Ugly Anna, is not different from what he has given us these twenty years, or perhaps it would be more grateful to say it is equally good, with no flaw in the crystal....
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