Warner, Sylvia Townsend - Glen Cavaliero (essay date 1981)
Glen Cavaliero (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "The Short Stories," in "Sylvia Townsend Warner 1893-1978: A Celebration," edited by Claire Harman, in PN Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1981, p. 45.
[In the following essay, Cavaliero lauds Warner's literary skill and "ability to celebrate the singular without declining into singularity. " ]
Sylvia Townsend Warner may have been neglected by the critics, but her work was not unread. For over forty years her short stories appeared in The New Yorker, giving her a world-wide reputation; over one hundred and fifty of them appeared in published collections. Clearly she found them an appropriate medium for her gifts.
Those gifts included a talent for the telling phrase; similes that illuminated and did not distract; an eye for strangeness and incongruity; a detailed knowledge of the practicalities of daily life; the power to generalise informatively, an apparent inability to waste words, and a...
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