SOURCE: Howard, Maureen. “What It Was Like.” Atlantic Monthly 249, no. 3 (3 March 1982): 83-5.

In the following excerpted review, Howard contends that “though the individual pieces in Scenes of Childhood are charming, bright, and well-turned, I think that book as a whole does Miss Warner's memory a disservice.”

Strictly speaking, neither Patrick White's Flaws in the Glass nor Sylvia Townsend Warner's Scenes of Childhood is an autobiography. In the one case, Patrick White, the Australian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, insists on the constricting subtitle “A Self-Portrait.” In the other, Miss Warner, the British writer known to us primarily through her stories in The New Yorker, never intended to write an autobiography: her memoirs have been “ordered into sequence” by a doting editor after her death. But we've learned by now that there is no proper form, no set procedure, for autobiography. …

Through the individual...