[In the following review, Howard provides a positive review of Warner's collected letters and poetry and addresses the lack of critical attention to her oeuvre.]

She has no critical cachet whatever, this writer. Her fifteen volumes of fiction are not examined in studies of the modern English novel—even Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927) fails to appear in bibliographies of gay writing, though it is, with Stein's Things As They Are, the most passionate homosexual novel I know. She is not “taught,” and I have never heard her mentioned on those occasions when poets are “ranked.” Women's studies have neglected her, too, though her status among the serenely Sapphic householders is irreproachable: whenever she and Valentine Ackland were separated, William Maxwell tells us in his tactful but explicit introduction, they wrote each other at the beginning and end of every day, and “these letters, love letters, were preserved. After Ackland's death, Warner put them in the proper sequence and had them transcribed and wrote an introduction and connecting narratives, all with the idea that they should some day be published.” That day has not come, and we must wait as well for the untranscribed journal which runs, Maxwell says—though brims is surely the word—through forty notebooks. The letters published [in Letters] are but a selection, but even this chastened showing gives us enough to declare her among the finest letter writers in the language, one who must be included in the three-centuries-long strand linking (to mention only women, who for obvious reasons prevail in this genre) Dorothy Osborne to Virginia Woolf.

Born in 1893 and educated at home by intellectual parents, Warner believed herself to be first of all a musician; had it not been for the outbreak of World War I, she would have gone to Vienna to study with Schönberg. As it was, she became a musicologist and worked for many years on that monumental effort of English musical scholarship, Tudor Church Music (1922-29). At the other end of her 84-year life, she became both a translator (of Proust's critical writings, her preface to which is among the indispensable texts on that author) and a biographer (of T. H. White, a labor that involved her with Arthurian romance and, perhaps, stimulated her to that late flowering, Kingdoms of Elfin, crystalline tales as authoritative as Dinesen's, and as alien).

Meanwhile, without paying much attention to the literary scene—though she was close to David Garnett and T. F. Powys, was a niece of Arthur Machen and was represented in Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse—she wrote her poems and fictions. I suspect the point of the poetry would be considerably sharpened if we did not know the prose to be so masterful and so attractive: it is difficult to believe that even this great quantity of verse is more than a second string to her bow. But this is not the case; Warner is a poet of great and consistent achievement. Our difficulty is with the mode of her verse rather than with its amount. She is not a modernist, and her fashion is not our fashion; ease, profusion, recurrent pattern and confidence in natural presences are démodé among us, and what we admire in Crabbe and Edward Thomas, in Hardy and de la Mare, we find suspect in a writer still active (till 1980!) among us, a writer who would rather be interesting than excruciating, who prefers centers to edges, meetings to sunderings, who chooses not so much to anatomize a state as to fix a vision. It is just because Warner is so willingly observant of the household bonds of life that she so often rises above them, sustained and even stimulated by her old-fashioned methods, as I am happy to call them:

Sea-winds blew there,
Sea-birds flew there,
Nothing grew there
Save the inherent tares of barren
          ground;
Grasses shrivelled and stiff,
And frantic thistles scattering their
          seed.
Claw-rooted was each necessitous
          weed
And salt to the taste,
For the blown rack groped over the
          waste,
And evermore the sea with a tram-
          pling sound
Beleaguered the cliff.

(“Peeping Tom”)

Charms, hex signs, incantations and runes—the poems are the deliberate mutterings of the Wise Woman of Dorset, and they keep faith with the 8-year-old who sat on the stairs, as Warner recalls in one letter, reading aloud spells for raising the Devil from Mackay's Popular Delusions to her black cat and “feeling a black hope that they would work.”

Perhaps the best ingress into this somewhat daunting body of work is her “Seven Conjectural Readings,” lyric monologues in which figures from myth and history who bear an oblique relation to the story give us their version—John Donne's wife, Madame de Sévigné's son-in-law. Here is the end of “Lady Macbeth's Daughter”:

The castle walls are slighted down,
The pretty martlets all are flown,
My beads were scattered in the fray,
The king's son stole my relic away.
Barefoot I trudge through mire and
          sleet
To gather nettles for my meat
And the poor's curses rattle after
Poor me, that am my father's and my
          mother's daughter.

Another triumph is “Five British Water Colours” (1947), in which landscapes from Thomas the Rhymer's heath to Dickens's hearth become the sacred places, the secret plots which generate a thousand years of English country life.

What makes the poems and the letters part of the same energy, the same perception, is Warner's trust that myth and autobiography may be observed in one and the same life, her own for instance. The letters give off the same shadowy sense one has about Hardy's life—that it is accompanied by an incomprehensible nightmare we can know only by allusion and reflection. Hardy's Emma and Warner's Valentine are both impossible enigmas—Valentine leads Sylvia into the Communist Party in 1934, leaves her for another, returns to their life together, tries but fails to drag her into the Catholic Church in the 1940s—yet none of this is directly recounted. What we must read these letters for, beyond the divination of a life story and the skeleton of a Great Romance, is the rapturous quotidian: the sound of owls in the garden (“they expressed themselves in brief tinny exclamations, very much as if they were striking small cheap triangles”), Byron, a conversation with Peggy Ashcroft about Isabella in Measure for Measure, The New Yorker's prudery. It is not miscellany, though; it is order, for these letters are the crystallization of a trained mind, of a hand and eye that have learned to work together. The last letter, written when she was 84, characteristically insists on an artist's gift for observation (in this case, Van Eyck's) rather than on his adherence to mere symbol: “The dog may be an emblem of fidelity, but, I think, it is just an expression of dog's (lady's dog) habit for being in the foreground. Just such a dog walks past on the opposite bank every morning, taking its gentleman for a constitutional. The gentleman is an expression of fidelity. His sneeze rings out over the drenched meadow.”

I cannot agree with Maxwell that to have indexed the letters would have been “like indexing life itself.” This is not charm, this is not chaos, but a commanding intuition of how to live, and even in collecting samples for this review, I am bewildered where I might have been tidy. Warner is the kind of authority one wants to be able to cite without having to leaf through hundreds of pages. Take this precious observation of G. B. S., for instance: “I remember a dress rehearsal of Heartbreak House when Shaw bounded onto the stage and became a young girl. He was infinitely better at it than the actress, even when she had studied him, he far out-girled her. He had a tirra-lirra twirl of the waist that I went home and practised by the hour. I couldn't do it either.” That goes under “S” in the index I am making for these life-enhancing letters, unless it goes under “G.”