[In the following favorable review of Selected Stories, Yardley maintains that however diverse Warner's stories “may be in tone and settings, her stories are all noteworthy for their graceful, witty prose and their tough, uncompromising intelligence.”]

The stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner, as collected in this generous volume [Selected Stories], defy categorization if not description. Warner, who died a decade ago at the age of 85, was a British writer whose styles and subjects varied widely; she seems to have been intimidated by nothing and to have been willing to attempt anything. Though the fortunes and misfortunes of love are principal themes in her work, she treats them in everything from realistic stories about middle-class British life to fairy tales set in a realm of her own imagining, the Kingdoms of Elfin; but however diverse they may be in tone and settings, her stories are all noteworthy for their graceful, witty prose and their tough, uncompromising intelligence.

For many years, but particularly during the 1950s, Warner's stories appeared with frequency and regularity in The New Yorker. This was the golden age for fiction in that magazine and Warner clearly was one of its stars, but at the time I was too young to have any interest in her work and therefore did not read it; this is just as well, as no doubt in adolescence I would have had no idea of what she was writing. So for me, as I suspect it will be for other readers, it is a pleasure to have an introduction to her work in these four dozen stories, selected and thematically arranged by her literary executors, Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell.

One of the best of them is called “Their Quiet Lives”; it is about a difficult old woman whose unmarried son and daughter cannot shake the maternal apron strings, much though each longs to, and thus encompasses in its few pages such weighty themes as dominance, submission and resentment. It is no more typical of her work as a whole than any other story—indeed a “typical” Warner story seems not to exist—except that the quietness of its subjects' lives is a condition shared by virtually all of Warner's characters. They are lovers and writers and soldiers and artists, but few among them play out their dramas on the public stage; their moments of revelation, when they arrive, tend to be private, at times so intensely private as to be visible not even to the characters themselves, only to the reader.

The first story in the collection, “A Love Match,” gets matters off to an arresting start. Justin and Celia Tizard are a brother and sister in their 30s, though they seem much older, living in self-imposed exile in France; he is a wounded veteran of the First World War, while she grieves for a fiancé killed in that conflict. When at last they return to Britain, it is to a quiet life in the provincial town of Hallowby. What they alone know is that their relationship is passionately incestuous: “Loving each other criminally and sincerely, they took pains to live together happily and to safeguard their happiness from injuries of their own infliction or from outside.” Theirs is “the exaltation of living in defiance of social prohibitions and the absorbing maneuvers of seeming not to live in compliance with them,” but in time the effort takes its toll; how they cope with it, and how the community responds when it begins to sense their secret, are the material for powerful, and acute, psychological inquiry.

Similar inquiry is made in the very different atmosphere of “But at the Stroke of Midnight,” wherein a woman married for many years suddenly walks away from her husband and household; he and the police believe it to be a case of amnesia, but in truth—as both husband and wife silently acknowledge—it is occasion for the parting that both of them have sought. In “An Act of Reparation,” a young woman encounters her husband's former wife at the bank; while the younger woman finds herself already “sunk in marriage,” she fancies that her predecessor resents her and pines for her former husband—what she cannot know is that the older woman has flung off the burdens of matrimony “and she had cast them onto the shoulders of this hapless child and gone flourishing off, a free woman.”

Here as elsewhere, Warner cherishes individuality, and individual freedom, more than family. She admired oddity, and unconventionality, and she took a wry pleasure in the quiet peculiarities of people who go slightly against the grain: a servant who, mistreated in her mistress' will, steals from her jewelry cabinet so as to get “no more than her due—enough to ensure that she would end her days still retaining her independence and self respect”; a writer who takes pity on a dotty old woman but finally realizes that he must “do nothing for her, but put her into a story”; a quiet traveler who in the course of a long night “had performed a sufficiency of odd acts.” In the opening paragraph of “How to Succeed in Life,” she gives us in only three sentences a quintessential Warner character and situation:

Many eminent self-made men have been foundlings or bastards, and Mr. Silas Honey was no exception to this rule. His mother was a rather elderly lady's maid who had come down in the world and kept a second-hand clothes shop in Plymouth, and whose appearance was so fusty and forbidding that no one could imagine who was the father of her child, unless, perhaps, he was begotten by an old pair of trousers. She died in labor, and the child was taken to the workhouse, where he was kept, as other oddments are kept, in the hopes that he might be useful later.

It is in these stories of British eccentricity and of the peculiar passages of love that Warner is at her best. Her fairy tales—seven are included, at the end of the collection—are elegantly written and inventive; but the fairy tale, as a genre for adult readers, is not much to my taste, so their quality must be judged by those with a stronger affinity for it. But for the previous 350 pages I am most grateful; it is always a pleasure to discover a writer of wit and acuity, and these qualities Sylvia Townsend Warner possessed in abundance.