SOURCE: Panter-Downes, Mollie. “All Things Both Great and Small.” New Yorker 59 (30 May 1983): 98-102.

In the following review, Panter-Downes offers a laudatory review of Warner's collected letters as well as an overview of the author's life and work.

Some years before she died, in 1978, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend and literary executor William Maxwell saying that she would try to leave her papers in shipshape order for him. She added, as an afterthought, that “the people who were attached to me might … like a collected volume of my letters. I love reading Letters myself, and I can imagine enjoying my own.” It was clearly in her mind, she admitted later, that Mr. Maxwell, her editor at The New Yorker for many years, should edit any such collection, and here is the result: fifty-seven years' pick of her Letters which he has assembled—sometimes with difficulty where correspondents...