SOURCE: A review of Swans on an Autumn River, in The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books 1920-1970, edited by Gilbert A. Harrison, Liveright Publishing, 1972, pp. 333-39.

In the following review, which was originally published in The New Republic in 1966, Updike comments on the "genius" of Warner's writing.

The stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner stick up from The New Yorker's fluent fiction-stream with a certain stony air of mastery. They are granular and adamant and irregular in shape. The prose has a much-worked yet abrasive texture of minute juxtaposition and compounded accuracies. Candles are lit in an antique shop, and "The polished surfaces reflected the little flames with an intensification of their various colors—amber in satinwood, audit ale in mahogany, dragon's blood in tortoise shell." Two old ladies reminisce: "They talked untiringly about their girlhood—about the winters when they went skating, the summers when they went...