"There's been another horrid murder by Teddy Bears": a well-bred female voice disturbs the Sunday quiet ("as though the words had been etched in dry-point on the silence") of a hotel lounge, and thus the little joke, heard or imagined, becomes the nucleus of another story by Sylvia Townsend Warner. As, in the uncharacteristically laborious title story here, does a cook's mistaking snuff for curry; or, in a story dated shortly before Warner's death, a woman's sewing a "Widow's quilt" after seeing one in the American Museum in Bath.

Those who like to see the grain of sand working in the oyster of a story-teller's mind are splendidly served when another story is prefaced by a letter from the author to her friend George Plank in 1963, which uncovers the story's genesis. An American, she writes, has left a somewhat sumptuous hat, of Piccadilly provenance, in the antique shop of her woman friend; they have kept it piously, and put it outside, accessible but safe from cats, whenever they leave home; she would like to wear it herself, but her friend says this would "make her conspicuous" ("What other purpose has a hat?"); if it is unclaimed at Christmas, she will send it to George Plank.

This engendered a story, "Some Effects of a Hat", which appeared in the New Yorker a year later, about an American's leaving a similar hat in the home of a spinster (more exactly a weaver, of tweeds) in a Devonshire village; about her trying it on herself, with some pleasure—"instead of resembling a sheep, she resembled a goat"—and how it gives rise to rumour and thence to violence in the village, so that she flees (after having precipitately but sensibly sold up her home, because this author never forgets the practicalities of life) to her unknown cousins in Derbyshire, one of whom, in no time at all, and with every promise of happiness, she marries.

The tiny incident is transmuted, by the storyteller's authority, into a story shimmering with humour and pain, carrying all the blithe inconsequence of chance, which forges its own logic. Unhappily, this is the only time when editorial reticence is breached by Susanna Pinney, who thanks no fewer than three of her publishers for their "help and advice" but does not say why such a large corporate effort was required, nor anything about the unpublished work still remaining, from which she had drawn seven of the twenty stories here. Of the thirteen published stories, eleven appeared in the New Yorker, whose urbane contours coincided comfortably with the author's, and all of them appeared between 1944 and 1977, in the last thirty years of her life. Presumably the unpublished ones date from this period too, but the editor does not confirm this.

Dates are of little significance, however, where there is no evolutionary change, and all the stories might equally well have come from the previous two decades of the author's writing life. For just over half a century, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote a witty, warm-hearted, well-mannered prose which never assumed greater significance than the giving—or more exactly, as she made it seem, the sharing—of a good deal of quiet enjoyment. (What might seem to us now the most "contemporary" of these stories, with a heavy charge of menace under its blandness, appeared in Lilliput in 1948.) She was happiest in the liberating latitudes of eccentricity, or when she could tilt some wellfleshed verisimilitude gently over into the unlikely, or perhaps beyond that into the fantastic; but she was a modest exotic, and her taste for the improbable was always tempered by good humour, good taste and good will. Lolly Willowes, her first full-length heroine, back in the 1920s, might quite placidly turn into a witch, but cannot be conceived of as riding a camel in English lanes, for instance, or any of the other arrogant excesses to which fiercer writers like Rose Macaulay put ladies of similar ilk.

The one appreciable shift in her focus came late in life, when she succumbed to the temptations of mere fancifulness, which notably beset English writers in the genteel tradition; but even then, her rather tiresome four-foot elves, or Elfins, as she called them, remain paramortals, as serenely incisive as her humans. Four Elfin stories conclude this book; only one appeared in the New Yorker (it would be interesting to know if the others were rejected, or never submitted). Admirers may persuade themselves of an allegorical aftertaste in these stories—some familiar resonance, say, when Tamarind sets out to find and serve the philosophical author of "Grub's Exposition of the Limited" but ends at the feet of a gnomically vacuous peasant Grub. Less determined readers may simply find them a sad sign of declining imaginative powers.

With the recent publication of Scenes of Childhood and of her letters, there is evidently an elegant conspiracy afoot to remind us of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Rightly so; this collection lies too much under the New Yorker's seal of approval, but her vision was both sharper and broader than this may suggest. If we are to keep her in perspective, though, we do need rather more information than we are given here about what is "selected", and how it is "edited".