Warner, Sylvia Townsend - William Arrowsmith (essay date 1956)
William Arrowsmith (essay date 1956)
SOURCE: "News from Mojave," in The Hudson Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Autumn, 1956, pp. 479-80.
[In the following excerpt from a review of Winter in the Air, Arrowsmith describes Warner as being "an almost flawless writer" within a narrow range of fiction. ]
Within severe limits, Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner is an almost flawless writer, and Winter in the Air is an astonishingly sustained collection of a score of short stories. It is rare to find delicacy so untroubled by the fear of preciousness, and fastidiousness so capable of emotional, rather than verbal or atmospheric, precision. She is incapable of real power and these stories are innocent of ideas, but all worked up out of a scrupulous literacy and a fine eye, invariably particular and minor, but with the right power of the minor that flows from a good imagination, poised for the particular. She likes the lambent touch, an eloping girl...
[The entire page is 352 words long]
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