[In the following excerpt, Vannatta provides a positive assessment of The Museum of Cheats.]

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) should best be remembered as a short story writer, although she was a prolific writer who produced, in addition to twelve volumes of short stories, novels, poetry, biographies, and authoritative studies of Tudor church music. Warner was already fairly well known to some American readers when The Museum of Cheats appeared in 1947. Eight of the stories in this volume had, in fact, appeared previously in the pages of the New Yorker, another reminder of that magazine's contribution as an international outlet for superior short fiction.

The Museum of Cheats contains twenty-two stories of several types, the longest being the thirty-seven-page title story. Many of them achieve rather subtle effects through graceful stylistic turns. Warner reveals herself to be a skilled fantasist in some of the stories, and in all, she achieves verisimilitude and compression through her exact rendering of the minutiae of her characters' daily existence. Having created full-dimensional worlds and situations alive with nuance and possibility, Warner is content to let her readers do a great deal of the work; much may be discerned only by the intelligent reader, and many of her endings are ambiguous.

Warner, for example, skillfully employs the open ending in “Poor Mary,” where some truths, both poignant and droll, about human nature are ironically but convincingly presented. Time and circumstance have weighed heavily on the husband and wife of this tale. He has been a conscientious objector assigned to agricultural labor during World War II, and thus has led a lonely existence. She, as a member of the military, has been near the center of wartime activity. Weary and dispirited, she has become sloppy in mind and body, but he is self-contained, domestic, deeply contented. Poor Mary, who admits to having had an affair, now supposes that she is ready to have her husband back, and he is willing to take her back, too. At the end of the story he thinks of the pleasures of bed with her, but she seems to come second to the joys of rusticity: “They would lie in the Wordsworthian bed, their smells of dung and of metal would mingle, her shoulder would feel like greengages. … And probably his last waking thought would be of the alarm clock, poised to wake him at five-thirty, and of the limpid innocent morning in which he would go out to his work.” His serenity is apparently more than a willed narcosis, a withdrawal from the insanely destructive outside world. But we cannot be sure. And can she accept the same balm for the psychic wounds she suffered our there in that real world and live with him in his romantic idyll? Probably not, but the weight of ultimate interpretation falls upon the reader; Warner deliberately withholds enough relevant evidence so that readers are compelled to enter fully into the situation and draw their own conclusions.

Noting the frequent appearance of Warner's stories in the New Yorker, some readers might feel that she deliberately trades on Americans' notions that delightful quaintness and idiosyncrasy are inherently English. The title story, “The Museum of Cheats,” is likely to arouse this suspicion, but it is not altogether well founded. In this ironical history of an endowed museum that specializes in objects of superstition, Warner implicitly says something significant about human vanity and self-interest, not just English eccentricity. The narrative tone is deliciously dry as it details an often ignoble and debased kind of eccentricity in several characters, but Warner's view is not misanthropic; it is compassionate and amused even while it is critical.

Other stories are about relatively ordinary civilian life during the war; “A Speaker from London” is a two-sided view of the ongoing class struggle at home even as England fights an external enemy for survival.