Warner, Sylvia Townsend - Anne Duchêne (essay date 1984)
Anne Duchêne (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "Witty and Well-Mannered," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4247, August 24, 1984, p. 953.
[In the following review, Duchêne describes Warner's prose as "witty, warmhearted, [and] well-mannered," but questions the selection and editing of the stories in One Thing Leading to Another.]
"There's been another horrid murder by Teddy Bears": a well-bred female voice disturbs the Sunday quiet ("as though the words had been etched in dry-point on the silence") of a hotel lounge, and thus the little joke, heard or imagined, becomes the nucleus of another story by Sylvia Townsend Warner. As, in the uncharacteristically laborious title story here, does a cook's mistaking snuff for curry; or, in a story dated shortly before Warner's death, a woman's sewing a "Widow's quilt" after seeing one in the American Museum in Bath.
Those who like to see the grain of sand working in the oyster of a...
[The entire page is 958 words long]
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