Warner, Sylvia Townsend - Hallie Burnett (essay date 1962)
Hallie Burnett (essay date 1962)
SOURCE: "The Indecisive Denouement," in The Saturday Review, (New York), Vol. 45, No. 16, April 21, 1962, p. 30.
[In the following review, Burnett pronounces Warner's style in the stories of A Spirit Rises lucid and graceful. ]
Since it is the sharpest and briefest form in dramatic literature, and since there is room in the short story for humor or pathos, realism or symbolism, it has, as shown by Sylvia Townsend Warner in A Spirit Rises, something for everyone.
Take the story "Barnby Robinson," where the wrongdoer in a triangle becomes the victim in an unforeseen way. At the beginning the situation is conventional enough: a playwright is leaving home for another woman, an actress, and a sad little scene takes place between him and the patient wife he forsakes. "On both their parts it was an expedient not to look at each other," we are told, and here, as always, Miss Warner shows us...
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