[In the following excerpt, Vannatta deems Warner's short fiction pure and economical.]

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) never published a representative collection of her short fiction, which is unfortunate, for she deserves such a monument to her position in the honor roll of the century's storytellers. Like Bates, Pritchett, and Davies, she has enormous reservoirs of sympathy and understanding, and like them she never allows herself to become sentimental with her characters. They are presented, revealed, even judged and found wanting, but neither despised nor excused. Above all is the quality of her style, elusive to describe or analyze, yet unmistakably Warner. Consider, for example, the opening sentences from the title story of her only 1950s collection, Winter in the Air (1956):

The furniture, assembled once more under the high ceiling of a London room, seemed to be wearing a look of quiet satisfaction, as though, slightly shrugging their polished shoulders, the desk had remarked to the bookcase, the Regency armchair to the Chippendale mirror, “Well, here we are again.” And then, after a creak or two, silence had fallen on the dustless room.

Here is the absolute assurance of one who knows the value and weight of every word: polished and dustless have seldom seemed such sad and sterile words, and the tone of quiet resignation has seldom been given such casual yet solid embodiment. So often in Warner one meets, too, her peculiarly original angle of vision, as if, to use Henry James's metaphor, she had found some window on the world that the rest of us have overlooked, even though it so clearly provides an excellent view. Things in her stories have an idiosyncratic life of their own, a quality deriving perhaps from Warner's faith in the occult and her belief in spiritual powers beyond the material and mechanical.

In “Winter in the Air,” objects are the keys that unlock emotional doors. Each piece of furniture in the London flat reminds Barbara of something in the recent or distant past; each is connected in her mind with the events leading to her being replaced in her husband's affections by another woman. Quietly, like Hermione of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, she has been forced from married life into becoming a mid-century nun, locked not in a convent but in a London flat after one of those “decent” and “understanding” modern divorces. The furniture is emblematic, too, of the emotionless retreat of her return to single life: “Like the furniture, she would settle down in the old arrangement, and the silence of the room would not intimidate her long; it was no more than a pin-point of silence in the wide world of London.” Silence is what this story is all about, the terrible loneliness of a faithful wife who has, she knows not how, lost home and husband.

Warner also has a mischievous side. “A Kitchen Knife” is a domestic high comedy, written with impish cleverness in a style showing masterly control over tone and delight in metaphor. The main characters are a young husband and wife: he is Trevor Gilmore, up from the lower middle classes by just a notch; she is Rachel, of a more genteel and leisured family. After three years of enduring a one-room marriage in the house of Trevor's parents, they finally get a council house of their own, from which Trevor leaves every morning to work in a bank and to which he returns with the visions of meat extract advertisements dancing in his head. Pathetically, he sees a happy marriage as built on kitchen gadgets, plastic salad bowls (“Choice of art shades in pink, blue, or old gold”), patent potato peelers, bean slicers, egg whisks, and grapefruit knives. Rachel, believing that she must be content in her situation, remains so until invited by her old friend Celia Hanson for a Sunday lunch. There Trevor meets for the first time a cultural level higher than his own: real paintings, genuine silver, old china, rural Georgian solidity. Rachel, too, is changed, and she walks out of the house with a real kitchen knife in her purse. Exulting in her thievery and the revelation of the afternoon, she rides home determined to keep her prize: “Though it had done its work already, severing her from her illusions as cleanly as it would trim off the fat from a cutlet, it was still a thing she wanted, a proper kitchen knife.” The story is at once extraordinarily funny and sad; there is something in it of Warner's favorite writer, Jane Austen. But it is unmistakably a story of the fifties, with its witty glances at the changes England was undergoing socially and culturally.

Warner published no more collections of stories until The Kingdoms of Elfin in 1977, but individual pieces appeared frequently in the New Yorker, among them, those that formed a posthumous volume of fictionalized autobiographical sketches, Scenes of Childhood (1981). Her writing is in the broad tradition of English belles letters without being in the least precious or affected. Her work deserves to be more widely known.