Sylvia Townsend Warner was variously gifted. In The Corner that Held Them she wrote one of the finest novels to appear in this country since the war. She wrote also a magnificent biography of T. H. White, tragic author of The Once and Future King. But primarily she was, like White himself, a fantasist.

I'm not a Hobbit-man, not a Watership-down-man, not even a Narnia-man. These fantastics are too long, too self-important, too axe-grinding. But Sylvia Townsend Warner's otherworldliness is far different from these.

For a start, her prose is always a delight—sharp, crisp, unflagging, and often very funny. In England she never got her due, but America recognised her worth, and fourteen of the sixteen stories in her last collection Kingdoms of Elfin—she died a year or two back in her eighties—appeared first in the New Yorker.

Her various elfland hideouts are all nonmoral places, yet somehow never trivial. Her detail is richly inventive and surprising—but surprising in an assured way that commands instant acceptance. Her elfland creatures are small and green and have wings. These wings though are generally held to be bad form, and flying hours are kept to a minimum. Uncontrollable tail-spins and crash-landings are not unknown. They play three-handed whist, knit a lot, and eat well. At the same time they can become nonchalantly murderous if overworld beings start interfering. Time, most terrifying of dimensions, doesn't exist for them, and a Lecturer in Rhetoric at the University of Aberdeen who gets pulled underground finds that his watch stops instantly.

In addition this author can be highly indelicate, but always in a most delicate way: such a change from the routine crapulous bawdy which novelists now reach for in deference to passing fashion.