Stylish and ironic tales

Press, 17 April 1982, Page 16

Stylish and ironic tales

Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories. By Sylvia Townsend Warner. Chatto and Windus, 1981. 177 pp. $17.95. The art of short story writing is one of infinite variety. It is also an art which may appear easy, but which requires great skill to perfect. Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of the few writers of this century who achieved mastery in this field and it is a pleasure to find in this posthumously published volume many of her stories which have previously appeared only in periodicals. Miss Townsend Warner is renowned as a novelist and a poet, and has also produced eight earlier collections of short stories. Those in this book have been gathered from the stories she wrote for the “New Yorker” between 1936 and 1973. As suggested by the title, the stories are mainly concerned to capture the author’s memories of events in her lifetime. However, whether the stories are based on

fact or imagination is of no great importance for Sylvia Townsend Warner’s wit, her gently ironic style and her delight in the eccentric transform the most trivial incident into a delicate and subtle work of art. The stories convey a perfect sense of the period in which they are set — what reader will forget the authoritative figure of Nannie Blount, that searcher into all hearts, being pursued by a cow, or the determination with which Mrs Warner approached the boiling of eggs in their Devonshire cottage? Both the subjects and the style are deceptively simple. The author is always in complete control of her material, her prose is stylish and polished, and her incisive and ironic observation of human foibles is always tempered by affection and gentleness. This book of short stories will send many readers back to reread Miss Townsend Warner’s other stories and novels. — Margaret Quigley