SOURCE: Kermode, Frank. “Breeding.” London Review of Books 16, no. 14 (21 July 1994): 15-16.

In the following review, Kermode notes the insights that Warner's diaries provide into her life.

Sylvia Townsend Warner died in 1978, aged 84. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926, and none of her later works quite matched its success. In her later years she was probably better known to most people as a name that appeared under rather than above story after story in the New Yorker; that journal published about fifty over a period of some forty years. She was a copious, elegant and witty writer, and since she produced these stories rather easily, she came to think of the New Yorker, for a long time an indispensable financial support, as a generous old admirer whom she could please fairly easily when she needed to.

In addition to the stories and novels she wrote poetry, and a...