[Kingdoms of Elfin] was a return to the earlier fantasy modality of [Sylvia Townsend Warner's] first masterpiece, Lolly Willowes, published half a century previously. Re-reading it, I thought how well T. S. Eliot's 'The end is where we start from … where every word is at home' … applied both to her books and her informal letter-writing which captured the essence of her personality.

At first sight it seems strange that Lolly Willowes with its amiable witch-heroine, followed by the hardly less fanciful Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), should have emanated from a hand that during World War I had been active in a munitions factory, but not to any one who has read her family chronicle The Flint Anchor (1954) which deals with the commercial fortunes of a family business…. Indeed, even in her idiosyncratic world, the 'plait', as she would say, always has a strong thread of realism interwoven with wit...