Warner, Sylvia Townsend - David Williams (essay date 1979)
David Williams (essay date 1979)
SOURCE: "Your Elf," in Punch, Vol. 277, August 1, 1979, p. 181.
[In the following excerpt from a review of The Kingdoms of Elfin, Williams praises Warner's prose as "a delight. "]
Sylvia Townsend Warner was variously gifted. In The Corner that Held Them she wrote one of the finest novels to appear in this country since the war. She wrote also a magnificent biography of T. H. White, tragic author of The Once and Future King. But primarily she was, like White himself, a fantasist.
I'm not a Hobbit-man, not a Watership-down-man, not even a Narnia-man. These fantastics are too long, too self-important, too axe-grinding. But Sylvia Townsend Warner's otherworldliness is far different from these.
For a start, her prose is always a delight—sharp, crisp, unflagging, and often very funny. In England she never got her due, but America recognised her worth, and fourteen of the...
[The entire page is 354 words long]
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