SOURCE: Vannatta, Dennis. “The English Short Story, 1945-1950.” In The English Short Story 1945-1980: A Critical History, pp. 12-13. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Vannatta provides a positive assessment of The Museum of Cheats.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) should best be remembered as a short story writer, although she was a prolific writer who produced, in addition to twelve volumes of short stories, novels, poetry, biographies, and authoritative studies of Tudor church music. Warner was already fairly well known to some American readers when The Museum of Cheats appeared in 1947. Eight of the stories in this volume had, in fact, appeared previously in the pages of the New Yorker, another reminder of that magazine's contribution as an international outlet for superior short fiction.

The Museum of Cheats contains twenty-two stories of several types, the longest being the thirty-seven-page title story. Many of them achieve rather subtle...