[In the following excerpt, Long comments on the "sophistication" and "imagination" of Warner's stories in The Innocent and the Guilty.]

Sylvia Townsend Warner, who is now in her late seventies, has had a long, distinguished career. Her stories practically glisten with craftsmanship, and her imagination has a quality of urbanity that is present in all the tales in The Innocent and the Guilty, regardless of how different the scenes and characters are.

In "The Perfect Setting" Miss Warner has an opportunity for satire on manners and social types. To the garden of the late poet Oswald Corbett come a number of admirers, including Mrs. Bugler, who has gone through Corbett's manuscripts examining every watermark; Father Garment, S. J., who has discovered a latent Catholicism in Corbett's "Three Odes to Ovid," and Professor Mackenzie, who has translated Corbett's poems into Lallan. Another devotee wants to tape-record the owls in the garden. But the principal seeker is a journalist named Bannerman, whose interest in Corbett has to do with sales. The situation that develops between Bannerman and Corbett's widow is observed with a wry irony and understatement. The same is true of "Bruno," in which a wellto-do Scottish gentleman in his sixties returns to settle in at his family estate with a nineteen-year-old companion named Bruno, "a lissome hearthrug cat." The social complications that result lead to a farcical dénouement.

Yet Miss Warner's sophistication operates at almost any level. In "But at the Stroke of Midnight" drab Lucy Ridpath leaves her husband and takes on the identity of a frivolous cousin who has recently died. The reader is caught up in her experience, and yet looks on helplessly, restrained by the author's detachment. "The Quality of Mercy," about an alcoholic middle-aged woman, is already a classic and will probably be included in anthologies for years to come.