SOURCE: A review of A Garland of Straw, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 157, No. 15, October 9, 1943, pp. 414-15.

In the following excerpt, Trilling claims Warner is "an accomplished practitioner of her craft," but finds fault with artistic practices of the generation of writers to which Warner belongs.

In writing last week about Eudora Welty's latest volume of short stories I said that somewhere between Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield the short story had got off its trolley, and I suggested that it was Miss Mansfield who was in large part responsible for the exaggerated subjectivity which has so variously corrupted modern short fiction. The line of descent from Miss Mansfield to Miss Welty may not always be easy to trace: the family resemblance is more a matter of the carriage of the head than of feature for feature. But in a writer like Sylvia Townsend Warner the connection can...