SOURCE: Chisholm, Anne. A review of The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Observer (19 June 1994): 18.

In the following review, Chisholm offers a favorable review of The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

In 1929 Sylvia Townsend Warner described in her diary how she held a friend's baby on her lap. It felt, she wrote, ‘like a short stout salmon. It is not a person one feels moving when one holds a baby: it is life, compact, darting, incalculable.’ Some of her most characteristic and admirable qualities are instantly apparent: the unsentimental eye, the speed of perception, and the zest for life in all its oddity.

For all her brilliance, there was something elusive about her. Her life was full of discontinuities: at first a musicologist, she became a poet and novelist; her first love was a middle-aged man, but the love of her life was a younger...