[In the following review, Toulson calls One Thing Leading to Another, and Other Stories "a good collection" that includes some characters who showcase Warner "at her sharpest and funniest. "]

Sylvia Townsend Warner, a prolific poet and novelist, was at her best in the sympathetic creation of eccentric and slightly dotty characters. She is probably most widely known for Lolly Willowes, first published in 1925 and reissued by The Women's Press in 1978, the year of her death. Lolly is a sad, wispy, lonely person, the conventional maiden aunt, half-crazed by her isolation and inability to build herself a satisfactory life in society. The twenty stories here, selected and edited by Susanna Pinney, are woven round several such figures: Helen Logie, the priests' housekeeper in the title story, who having once accidentally made curry with snuff, amuses herself thereafter in seeing how far she can go, undetected, in using bizarre ingredients in her cooking; Mary Daker, who reacts so strongly against her neighbours' commendation that she is 'always the same' the she provokes them into burning her effigy on the Guy Fawkes' bonfire; the garrulous Miss Belforest, who is compelled to read aloud every notice she sees. The extraordinary thing about all these lost and apparently limited people is that they are far more fully realized as human beings than the well-established members of society who try to do good to them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner is at her sharpest and funniest in her portrayal of these well-meaning busybodies. There is Mrs Pansy Carrington, measuring the time she spends with a lively and intelligent old lady in miserly quarter hours, and Mrs Camden, the rural vicar's wife, who makes blind, conventual steps to persuade a totally scatty family to take part in the life of the village at the very time that the pregnant wife is attempting to shoot her exasperatingly ridiculous husband.

The stories in which these individuals appear are the best of a good collection [One Thing Leading to Another, and Other Stories], which also includes two groups of tales. One is centred on the orderly Mr Edom and his disorderly antique shop, the other on the slightly Pre-Raphaelite and utterly odd Finch family with their two pert little daughters and ailing son. Less successful are the four fairy stories that end the collection. Sylvia Townsed Warner wrote a biography of T. H. White, and in these tales she uses fairies as he used the Arthurian legends, to comment on human affairs. Although they are well worked out, and often quite witty, they fail because her sympathies are always with people rather than ideas, and it is for her characters that she will always be remembered.