What we see in Kingdoms of Elfin and what characterises Warner’s oeuvre as a whole, is a remarkable degree of artistic independence that has consistently led to the somewhat bemused recognition with which so many appreciations of her work start, a ‘commonplace of criticism’,18 that she has been inexplicably neglected. In Claire Harman’s words, not unlike the fairy creatures she created who remain for the most part unseen to human eyes, Warner seems like ‘a ghostly figure in twentieth-century letters’.19 This independence can also be seen in her life as she seems to have weathered challenges and changes without fuss, and without losing sight of what was important to her. Luckily for readers of her fiction, much of her life can be found in Warner’s correspondence, her diaries, and Harman’s luminous account of her life.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893 into a family both privileged and intellectually stimulating. Her father, George Townsend Warner, was, by all accounts, an exceptionally gifted teacher of history at Harrow School.20 Warner herself was first educated by her mother Eleanor Mary Townsend Warner, née Hudleston, who seems to have had little interest in her daughter once she began to grow up because, as Warner thought, she was not a son.21 Warner seems to have been very close to her father. Claire Harman’s biography includes a haunting photograph of a teenage Sylvia skating with her father, a beautiful image of mutual grace and consideration, poised together in a spin, holding onto each other but also pursuing their own trajectories. The task of educating their only child moved from Warner’s mother to her father. As a result, she had access to her father’s considerable library as well as his expertise as a historian and as a teacher, and as a meticulous stylist in both writing and speech. This meant that she received an excellent education: ‘By the age of seventeen or so, Sylvia’s erudition was both phenomenal and perfectly natural. In the opinion of some, she was “the cleverest fellow we had”, to others she was known — somewhat disparagingly — as the best boy at Harrow’.22 It also meant that Warner completely escaped formal educational disciplines, schools, curricula, and the influence of the state in determining what young people should learn and read.

Warner maintained a close allegiance to historiography throughout her writing life: Kingdoms of Elfin is, among other things, an exploration of historical, regional and national environments.23 ‘History’ here means an especial commitment to historical materialism, the belief that the material lives of people, where their food comes from, how their money is earned, what their clothing is made of, as well as the general habits of a specific class or group, are instrumental in influencing what can be thought, felt, and communicated, and how. Warner returned repeatedly to different forms of the historical novel, for example her exploration of the February 1848 revolution in France in Summer Will Show (1936), medieval England in The Corner that Held Them (1948), and the world of the nineteenth century in The Flint Anchor (1954). At the same time, however, she would retain the autodidact’s freedom to bypass prescribed ideas of the canon. In her lecture on the historical novel Warner claimed that ‘when I was young, I read everything in the house’,24 and this seems to have set her free to seek and find inspiration where she felt she would find it.