[In the following review of the collection Ugly Anna and Other Tales, the critic admires Coppard's rendering of rural England.]

A. E. Coppard once wrote a story about a gentleman, a cook and a musical box. The musical box started to play, and for no particular reason the gentleman who had lived so staidly and respectably for years held out his hands to the cook and started waltzing round and round, down the steps and into the beyond. This story, with its troubling behaviour on the part of ordinary people, contains in miniature the genius of Coppard—freakish, tender, oddly penetrating, much imitated but inimitable. His new collection, Ugly Anna, is not different from what he has given us these twenty years, or perhaps it would be more grateful to say it is equally good, with no flaw in the crystal. Some of these stories are pure fantasy, such as "The Drum," and "Cheese," a new version of Coppard's favourite of the mouse-trap. But these are not the heart of his peculiar mystery, which consists in variations on the English theme. These characters who are animated by a life which is so grotesque, or tell with a reminiscent chuckle of such strange twists of fate—they are English of the English and recognizable from every country lane, rectory, pub and doorstep. "Under the turf lie the dead and gone neighbours, as close as may be allowed to the triangular green beside the post office and the old Swan tavern." From the dead neighbours and the living, the Jordans and the Merryweathers, Smulveys and Slowlys, Purdys and Cattermuts, Coppard spins his delicate tall stories. And from the homeliest (not the Basic) forms of the English language he spins his style. "The widow's last man had hung himself on a plum-tree, and that's a cold warning to any bachelor." . . . "The clock of time ticks you off, it ticks you off, and although Thaniel's hour had not yet struck he was being put, and not very gently either, on one side." Here is beauty, and with it goes a warning: "In some tales there is occasionally a little more than at first meets the eye, buried lightly as it were. It can't be helped, that's the way it goes."