[In the following review, Panter-Downes offers a laudatory review of Warner's collected letters as well as an overview of the author's life and work.]

Some years before she died, in 1978, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend and literary executor William Maxwell saying that she would try to leave her papers in shipshape order for him. She added, as an afterthought, that “the people who were attached to me might … like a collected volume of my letters. I love reading Letters myself, and I can imagine enjoying my own.” It was clearly in her mind, she admitted later, that Mr. Maxwell, her editor at The New Yorker for many years, should edit any such collection, and here is the result: fifty-seven years' pick of her Letters which he has assembled—sometimes with difficulty where correspondents have died or homes have vanished—and arranged with love and just the right amount of annotation to keep our hold on the autobiographical thread. Love is clearly what she gave back in abundance to him and his family and to the other close friends she wrote to regularly—thousands of letters, poured out effortlessly between the stories, the novels, the poetry, the endless daily chores of life in a country cottage—with whom she carried on marvellous conversations “about anything and everything that came into our heads.” It made no difference if they met rarely. Paul Nordoff, for instance, who wrote to her in admiration of Mr. Fortune's Maggot, which he made into an opera, starts off formally as “Dear Mr. Nordoff” but becomes “Dearest Paul” not many pages on, and continues so, from Dorset across the Atlantic, until his death, forty years later. “It is so gratifying of you to say in your letter that you like me,” she wrote to him early in their correspondence. “Things of that kind, which can be very important, people usually omit to mention. Personally, I have no use for unspoken affections.” And so she speaks them, with energy.

The first letter in the selection is dated 1921, when Sylvia Townsend Warner was twenty-seven and living in London. She had been brought up in a quiet academic household, the only child of George Townsend Warner, a housemaster at Harrow, and his alarming, fascinating wife, Nora, one of the Anglo-Indian family of Hudlestons from whom Sylvia reckoned she had inherited “a subtle hand with curries,” her abhorrence of missionaries, and, as a special maternal legacy, a temperament “containing a considerable charge of dynamite.” She was educated at home, seemingly somewhat haphazardly, by both parents, with further history tuition from her adored father in the school holidays. His death, in 1916, at fifty-one—“mainly of grief” because so many of his most cherished pupils were being killed in France—desolatingly ended the plans they had enjoyed making of all they were going to do together after his retirement. She preferred to escape to London, on a shoestring allowance, rather than try to share a new home with her mother. It was the first “mutilating” loss of her life. She took rooms over a furrier's shop in Bayswater, and soon was deep in the world of musical scholarship, where she may have expected to stay. Music, not literature, had been her first passion. Though the war had interrupted her training in composition, she thought it would be her métier. For six years, starting in 1920, she labored as one of the four editors who brought the totally forgotten mass of English sixteenth-century liturgical music into the light of day from its oblivion in contemporary part-books, over which they scrupulously agonized about “whether to follow a manuscript which dotted a semibreve or a manuscript which didn't.” The ten volumes of the resulting great classic, Tudor Church Music, began publication in 1922. By then, she had begun to write poetry and her first novel, Lolly Willowes. Many years later, when Ralph Vaughan Williams asked her, “a little sternly,” why she had stopped composing, “I explained that … I didn't do it authentically enough, whereas when I turned to writing I never had a doubt as to what I meant to say.” In her letters, words often reach out naturally to music. “Such a sostenuto, my dear, and such an enharmonic twist at the end,” she exults over one of her stories. In a splendid summer, “the raspberries went on and on like Schubert.” Of a novel by T. F. Powys: “The action is like the best twelve-part counterpoint, a counterpoint in which each part has a separate fugal subject which it develops quite independently of its share in the development of the whole.”

Theodore Francis Powys and his brother Llewelyn—the second and the youngest of three brilliant, eccentric brothers—were among the instantly beloved new friends Sylvia Townsend Warner made in the days of hanging out, and on, over the furrier's, “poor, hungry and sensual.” On visits to Theo, she discovered Dorset—Powys country—where eventually she settled for life. His stories, with their casts of sometimes supernatural characters, clearly influenced her literary route as well. It was already mapped out for her. She believed in ghosts, as befits one who was visited in her cradle, it seems, by the apparition of her maternal grandmother and who had a rather grand great-aunt with a big house in Ireland where a famous poltergeist frequently set up a fearful racket. As a child in Harrow, she had the freedom of her father's library, and enjoyed the chills of reciting spells for raising Satan, dug out of a treatise on witchcraft, and rather hoping they would work. In her eighties, she was to report with matter-of-fact fidelity on the fairy world, as real to her imagination as it was to Yeats', in a sudden burst of stories about the ice-blooded inhabitants of the Kingdom of Elfin. No mysteries of immortal or mortal behavior ever seemed impossible or reprehensible to her in her writing or in her life. “The longer one lives, the more one has to pity” is her comment in one of the last letters, on learning from the widow of “a particularly amiable, generous, sensitive man” who had apparently killed himself for worrying financial reasons that the suicide was really expiation for the undiscovered murder of his first wife. Sending a new story to William Maxwell, she writes, “The theme, as you will see, is still my obsessive Innocent & the Guilty. Perhaps one day I shall be pure-minded enough to write a story where the innocent are charming and the guilty nauseating.” Her most unforgettable story, “A Love Match,” which was awarded the 1968 Katherine Mansfield Prix Menton, was about a quiet brother and sister whose relationship was discovered only when a German bomb wrecked their house and the rescue workers found them in bed together, locked in each other's arms under the debris.

In 1936, her stories had begun to find their perfect home in The New Yorker, which published a hundred and forty-four in the next forty years. A few years before that, a new character enters the letters. “I” becomes “We.” “No man has ever been able to bear me as a continuity,” she told Nancy Cunard, and one can understand why. David Garnett, a devoted friend who disappears abruptly for unclear reasons from the correspondence, coming back again as “Dearest David” when they are both old, put his finger on the spot in his description of the youthful Sylvia in “The Familiar Faces”: “I sometimes speak slowly, waiting for the right word to come to me, and when I am talking to Sylvia it very rarely does come, for she cannot restrain herself from snatching my uncompleted sentence out of my mouth and giving it a much better ending. She quivers with eagerness, as though I were really going to say something good, and then dashes in and transforms my sentence and my meaning into a brilliance that I should have been the last person to have thought of.”

It sounds hardly the recipe for a happy regular union with any man who might like to hear how his remarks would turn out. Staying with Theodore Powys, she met Valentine Ackland, a younger woman poet who became the center of her existence for thirty-nine years. There are no letters to her in this collection. If they were ever separated, they wrote to each other twice a day, and the letters were preserved by them, “creased with being carried in pockets, kept under pillows, read and re-read.” Mr. Maxwell tells us that after Valentine's death from cancer in 1969, Sylvia threw herself into the “engrossing agony” of putting the two halves into proper sequence, tied with a ribbon of narrative, apparently intending that someday the whole correspondence might be published. The portrait of Valentine that emerges from the present volume is rather enigmatic and has moments of reminding one of Proust's Albertine. Her cool physical presence is constantly conveyed in a few words, as in a letter from a rented house on the Norfolk coast where they spent some months one winter to lay “the small regretful uneasy niggling ghosts” of a brief infidelity on Valentine's part which had not yet been exorcised from their Dorset home. “All her beauty has come back to her, and she walks about like a solitary sea nymph … a sea nymph who can split logs with an axe … and cut up large frozen fish with a cleaver.” Sylvia lived on alone after her friend's death. In the year of her own, aged eighty-four, she noted another haunting: a young Cape jessamine in a pot standing in a dark corner “looks unearthly & like Valentine's ghost. Like Valentine's ghost, it scents the whole room.”

They were both undutiful but conscientious daughters of truly appalling mothers. There are exasperated, very funny accounts of going off to visit Mrs. Warner, aging but still a formidable tigress, in Devonshire, or to help scatty Mrs. Ackland, forced to quit her magpie's nest of a house, sort its demented chaos of “little booklets on spiritual healing, litanies for the Mothers' Union, nut-crackers, balls of string, all the God knows whatses which she carries around in a sheaf, and lets fall like affrighted Proserpina, on the smallest movement.” Their neighbors in Dorset—at least of the gentry persuasion, who might want to get better acquainted—seldom appear. In her wartime letters, Sylvia writes irritably of “the county hags” who came into the office of the Dorchester Women's Voluntary Services, where she sat filling out forms and simulating attention to their complaints. Her harsh comments are mostly for the pretentious privileged, the establishment, and “the inexhaustible solemn fatuity of the official mind.” Very occasionally, there are joyful accounts of friends, such as the engraver Reynolds Stone, and Peter Pears, and, toward the end of her life, Dame Peggy Ashcroft (“We talked our professions all day: a heaven-like variety of conversation. I have not had such a let-out for years”), who drop in and are welcomed with gala splurges of cooking and Beaujolais. Such social bursts are rare. “There is not a visitor on the horizon, and that is nicest of all,” she writes with satisfaction.

The quiet rural life she describes for her correspondents might be that of any highly cultured English countrywoman telling them what she has been doing and thinking, reporting on her work and her reading, the magnificence of her roses or the miserable failure of her vegetables, the behavior of the latest of a whole dynasty of idiosyncratic cats, what sort of weather she had looked out at that morning, the opera she had heard on the radio last night, and a host of other things—but telling them so vividly that the experiences she wanted to share with them must have dropped new-minted out of the envelope onto the breakfast table. The beautiful exactness of her images of nature, in particular, is astonishing. They are absolutely right, yet, as David Garnett said, one would have been the last person to have thought of them. A blizzard “began like the Comédie-Française with three blows.” The river flowing past their house “contains a water-rat who swims under our windows looking like a half-submerged bulrush.” She goes to visit a falconry friend of T. H. White, whose biography she wrote when she was seventy, and he shows her one of his eagle owls: “It walked out, slowly, stumping, its feet spotted in beige feathers down to the talons, tall ears standing up on its head, enormous round fire-coloured eyes—and was exactly like a court dwarf in Velásquez: Just about as tall, as erect, as burly, as intimidating. But the stare glowed like a furnace.” After a visit to London in the war, she wrote of the blackout, “It is indescribably moving to see that city just quietly abandoning itself to darkness, as though it were any country landscape. Meekly settling down in the dusk … and the noise thinning out from a mass of sounds to individual sounds, as though the night combed it.” And later on, her descriptions of the bombed ruins, such as this one, have not been equalled: “There is a row of grand houses, backing on the Green Park, which is beyond all: the great silent dusky dining-rooms with their mahogany doors weathered to a dusky grey-green, fern sprouting from their busy basements, and the tusks of the grand staircase rising tier above tier to end against the pale London sky.”

Sylvia Townsend Warner once said that if she could choose a reincarnation for herself she would like to be a landscape painter. She was a poet before she was a novelist, and her letters combine both arts. “My critical intelligence is what I most value in myself,” she wrote, “because it keeps a sort of compass-like integrity, and supplies me with interest enough (rather than courage, I think) to want to go on living.” The logbook entries it set down faithfully for her friends are life itself.