SOURCE: Feaver, Vicki. “Making a Stand against Habit.” Times Literary Supplement (18 March 1983): 278.

In the following review, Feaver considers Warner's poetic output, contending that “more real cause of regret, however, considering the strangely compelling quality of her best work, is that poetry was for most of her life a peripheral and not a major concern.”

In the course of Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel Lolly Willowes it suddenly dawns on the heroine that she is a witch by vocation. It is a discovery that not only liberates her from a life as a much put-upon spinster-aunt but also enables her to view the world with the eyes of a poet: noticing for the first time “the sudden oblique movements of the water-drops that glistened on the cabbage-leaves, or the affinity between the dishevelled brown hearts of the sun flowers and Mrs Leak's scrubbing-brush, propped up on the kitchen window-sill...