SOURCE: Vannatta, Dennis. “The English Short Story in the Fifties.” In The English Short Story 1945-1980: A Critical History, pp. 44-6. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Vannatta deems Warner's short fiction pure and economical.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) never published a representative collection of her short fiction, which is unfortunate, for she deserves such a monument to her position in the honor roll of the century's storytellers. Like Bates, Pritchett, and Davies, she has enormous reservoirs of sympathy and understanding, and like them she never allows herself to become sentimental with her characters. They are presented, revealed, even judged and found wanting, but neither despised nor excused. Above all is the quality of her style, elusive to describe or analyze, yet unmistakably Warner. Consider, for example, the opening sentences from the title story of her only 1950s collection, Winter in the Air (1956):

The furniture, assembled once...