Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Warner, Sylvia Townsend - Jane Spence Southron (essay date 1940)
Warner, Sylvia Townsend - Jane Spence Southron (essay date 1940)
Jane Spence Southron (essay date 1940)
SOURCE: "Catabasis," in The New York Times Book Review, October 20, 1940, p. 24.
[In the following review, Southron claims that in The Cat's Cradle Warner is "at her most beguiling best. " ]
"Our unhappiness transcended our egoism, and by degrees by a complicated process of advances and withdrawals, exchange of looks, fusion of silences, we fell deeply in love with each other. After that she lived with me . . . and now my whole life was transfigured, full of entertainment and delight. . . . Naturally, there was a good deal of talk about it—embassies always gossip." Which tells the story.
To begin with, you could hardly fail, even were no name attached, to recognize the writer. And, to proceed, the love affair was on the plane where the infrequent literary-human Alices meet in gentle, far too rare felicity; one party to the blissful, amorous interlude being a young embassy attaché,...
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Criticism
- Jane Spence Southron (essay date 1940)
- The Times Literary Supplement (essay date 1943)
- Diana Trilling (essay date 1943)
- James Hilton (essay date 1947)
- Eunice S. Holsaert (essay date 1947)
- Elizabeth Jennings (essay date 1955)
- Sara Henderson Hay (essay date 1956)
- Dachine Rainer (essay date 1956)
- William Arrowsmith (essay date 1956)
- Frederic E. Faverty (essay date 1962)
- Hallie Burnett (essay date 1962)
- John Updike (essay date 1966)
- Robert Emmet Long (essay date 1971)
- Sylvia Townsend Warner with Val Warner and Michael Schmidt (interview date 1975)
- Gabriele Annan (essay date 1977)
- William Jay Smith (essay date 1977)
- David Williams (essay date 1979)
- Glen Cavaliero (essay date 1981)
- Shirley Toulson (essay date 1984)
- Anne Duchêne (essay date 1984)
- Robert Crossley (essay date 1985)
- Barbara Brothers (essay date 1989)
- Further Reading
- Copyright
