In Kingdoms of Elfin,… Sylvia Townsend Warner … never condescends to an ethereal race that views mortals as "unfailingly serious and unfailingly absurd." Instead, she talks about fairies without being fey and creates a texture for the intangible.

Each of the book's 16 stories … can fly on its own. Taken together, they form both a whimsical saga of invisible dynasties and an extended commentary on Homo sapiens. Warner's elves are in many ways mirror images of men. They cannot weep and do not hate. They reproduce with difficulty but live for centuries: "Fairies are constructed for longevity, not fertility." They are governed exclusively by women—the more capricious the better. Mocking the human dream of taking wing, elves aspire to a place in society so high that flying will be beneath them. (p. 73)

Warner's prose duplicates the iridescent beauty of elfin life. Her descriptions are brushed with an unsettling magic. Yet Kingdoms of Elfin also pays humanity a backhanded compliment. There is melancholy as well as joy in the fairy state. Suspended somewhere between the angels and man, fairies are dropouts from the cosmic school of hard knocks. Warner's elfin courts are doomed to frivolity, to a tepid acceptance of beauty that does not die quite fast enough. In the book's last story, a mortal is given the last word. He is a passionate seeker of the fairies, who finds them, admires them and then compares them to a "swarm of mayflies, indivisibly borne aloft, lowering, shifting, veering, like a shaken impermeable gauze veil over the face of a stream." The fairies are free to laugh at this none-too-flattering description. The mortal response—sadness—is beyond them. (p. 74)