A great deal has happened to both literary taste and to Miss Warner's talent since 1926 when her Lolly Willowes was the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Not only have standards for the minor novelist fallen into a grave decline, and Gresham's Law seen them give way to the sentimentality of Rumer Godden or the pretentious trash of Wouk, but the exciting experimentation or relative daring of writers has, with little exception, been self-expurgated during the last couple of decades, so that their current work or the work of their successors seems archaic and stratified. It has not been a glorious road from Lolly Willowes to Winter in the Air.

Certainly by her earlier standards this collection of short stories, most of them reprinted from the New Yorker, indicates a decided thinning of a very substantial gift; however, by comparison with much of what passes for the art of fiction, it is work of a very high order indeed. Miss Warner seldom fails to illuminate an aspect of experience, but she equally seldom succeeds in exalting us by the uniqueness of her vision or the grandeur of her attempt.

Her characters, scrupulously portrayed, with an amused faintly contemptuous air—she is detached from the human condition, not identified with it, except for the first story which conveys a certain anguish—have a sameness, not necessarily arising from any real similarity, but from Miss Warner's square and unadorned approach. There is a plethora of the middle-aged, middle-class in either outlook or actuality, and even the young frequently seem tired and somewhat seedy; many of the stories occur during the War, or Post-War, and their atmosphere is, understandably, one of apathy and deprivation, occasionally relieved from dullness only by the author's humor and ironic detachment.

Her humor, sophistication, perception, and, above all, her preoccupation with craftsmanship, however orthodox, are all to be highly commended, and I do not mean to say this in a methodical or off-hand manner; they are indeed rare. Her passions, and, consequently, the degree to which she establishes rapport with her characters are limited by control and refinement in a typically English manner. Detachment, polish, and a faint, but unmistakable, upperclass allegiance cling to her as to that much underrated and equally cultivated writer, Somerset Maugham; Miss Warner's is a more complicated manner, but her preoccupations and her fluid style alike are reminiscent of the older writer, and like him, she fails in achieving a major status through an absence of ambition. For the minor novelist, like the minor painter, it is the scope of the work, all things being equal, that is decisive. These stories are created on a very circumscribed canvas; they are superbly executed, but Miss Warner is—at least in this collection—simply not concerned with larger moral issues or with an enraptured or highly imaginative approach to her art.