[In the following excerpted review, Howard contends that “though the individual pieces in Scenes of Childhood are charming, bright, and well-turned, I think that book as a whole does Miss Warner's memory a disservice.”]

Strictly speaking, neither Patrick White's Flaws in the Glass nor Sylvia Townsend Warner's Scenes of Childhood is an autobiography. In the one case, Patrick White, the Australian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, insists on the constricting subtitle “A Self-Portrait.” In the other, Miss Warner, the British writer known to us primarily through her stories in The New Yorker, never intended to write an autobiography: her memoirs have been “ordered into sequence” by a doting editor after her death. But we've learned by now that there is no proper form, no set procedure, for autobiography. …

Through the individual pieces in Scenes of Childhood are charming, bright, and well turned, I think the book as a whole does Miss Warner's memory a disservice. As they read about the bizarre nanny, the intriguing French teacher, her mother's culinary innocence (all done in fairly short takes), those who followed Miss Warner's New Yorker stories will be reminded of an easy literary style, an anecdotal manner, a tidy trans-Atlantic package of prose that, like a jar of special jam from Fortnum & Mason, is soon devoured, soon forgotten.

She was better than this in many ways, often writing stories that reflected upon English lives under the pressure of a changing social order. Her sense of place—the restored country house that has distracted its tenants from their failing marriage, the spiffy London flat without a history—can be as fine as Elizabeth Bowen's. But Miss Warner's method in sketching these memoirs is so hasty that she doesn't take time to set up a world. The point of an incident is that the butler was sinister or that her mother was imperious, and that point must be delivered with wit and a twist of delicate irony. The setting—an educated, upper-class household—is assumed; Miss Warner's father was a master at Harrow. The time, in twenty-four of the twenty-eight pieces, is Edwardian England as it maintained itself up to and including the romance of World War I. Sylvia Townsend Warner meant only to entertain, like the much-loved writers and actors who banded together to give up Upstairs, Downstairs, that elevated soap opera that everyone said was “so well done.”

How are we to believe in Scenes of Childhood without the elaborate costumes and sets, without the plummy voices of the privileged and the dropped haitches of the lower orders? We must rely on Miss Warner's faultless prose, tight, elegant, and archaic. Those who yearn for the old days of the untroublesome short story will be soothed by this collection, which confirms our familiar fantasies of a genteel English life disturbed only by unorthodox visitors and willful pets, a world in which the episodic tale can be launched with an authoritative sentence:

English people don't visit country churches now as they used to when I was young.

I think it is pretty generally admitted that my mother won the last war.

Change of climate will do much.

And when the scene is done with, the story can be closed with an equally precise, to some readers equally satisfying, aphoristic clincher.

There was no need to go on. She had won the war.

The sheets would do to shroud me in. So I went in and bought them.

There are a few pieces in which Miss Warner's reserve of manner and style break down—a great relief. The title story isn't one of her proper stories at all but a fully rendered description of the back garden of her childhood, and of an odd, overly bright little girl who experiences a moment of transcendence:

… the rubbish heap became a raft, and the ocean where it floated directionless was all around—and I left myself and was gone.

I don't remember what it was like being gone. I remember being startled back by a voice from the house calling me in because it was my bedtime. It was like the raw agony of recovering from frostbite.

I believe it is exceptional to have had only one experience of this sort of thing during a whole childhood. But I was an unimaginative child—solitary and agnostic as a little cat, and mistrusting other children to a pitch of abhorrence, as cats do.

And from this charged moment spills another memory connected mysteriously to that particular garden alive with paths, fences, boundaries. There, playing with old Major Beldam, a limping, childish fellow who has come to stay, the sly, doubting girl asks to see his wound (“I wanted certainty”), and is rewarded with a view of his varicose ulcer. Thus reality is forced upon her, and it's worse than what can be imagined, more fantastic than their game.

“Interval for Metaphysics” is closer to a personal essay, and again shows Sylvia Townsend Warner to have more than a clever turn of mind. She is particularly illuminating on the experience of learning to read: “The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity …” Sounds and double meanings, the enchantment of the literal, the fresh play of the mind with words, are soon lost:

The word sinks back into the thing, or at best betakes itself to the printed page. The period when one lived in two worlds at once is over. Perhaps not longer than six months, I said. When I try to recall it, I cannot retain it for as many minutes.

This subtle intelligence and occasional gift for understatement can be found in another episode, which leans toward parable, “The Young Sailor.” A young man sitting in the midst of children during a confirmation ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral suddenly gets up and goes away, a prefiguring of Miss Warner's own uncomplicated loss of faith.

It is unsettling to read Scenes of Childhood: the small talent in evidence here seems smaller still when we think that at the time Sylvia Townsend Warner began to write these reminiscences, in the late twenties and early thirties, the world she clung to had just been so passionately observed and irrevocably revised in the novels of Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh.