In her lecture ‘Women as Writers’ (1959), Warner set out to demonstrate not so much that women wrote, still less who the ‘great’ women writers were, if any existed, but rather how they wrote, claiming that they were ‘remarkably adept at vanishing out of their writing so that the quality of immediacy replaces them’.25 She gleefully demonstrates this ‘immediacy’ — a quality which she associates with the egoless artistry of women writers, and values highly — with quotations from women’s voices in non-canonical sources: a cookery book, Florence Nightingale’s reports from the front, a fifteenth-century letter, Julian of Norwich’s description of her perception of God. This virtue of ‘immediacy’ is very much a virtue of style, of a non-fussy, ‘immediate’ use of language, and Warner would have been her own best example. In a complicated irony she sees immediacy as the special domain of the marginalised woman writer, writers who eschew the pointing finger and dispense with trying to be ‘literary’ altogether, since this is tacitly reserved for male writers: ‘But I have sometimes wondered if women are literary at all. It is not a thing which is strenuously required of them, and perhaps, finding something not required of them, they thank God and do no more about it. They write. They dive into writing like ducks into water. One would almost think it came naturally to them — at any rate as naturally as plain sewing’.26

Her first intellectual love, however, was directed more towards music than writing. In 1917 she was appointed to the editorial committee of the Tudor Church Music Project, on which she worked for twelve years. As late as 1975, at the end of a long writing career, she would describe herself as ‘that odd thing, a musicologist’.27 She moved to London and, alongside the Tudor church music, began a life of writing in earnest. In 1925 she published her first collection of poems, The Espalier, and her first novel in 1926, Lolly Willowes, which became a Book of the Month in the US. She continued to publish poetry alongside novels and short stories (many published in the New Yorker from 1936 on). Later in life, she also translated from the French: A Place of Shipwreck, a translation of Jean-René Huguenin’s La Côte Sauvage (1962), and By Way of Sainte-Beuve (translation of Marcel Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, 1967). In 1967 she published a commissioned biography of the acclaimed and troubled English writer T H White. While her status as a literary figure may have been on the margins rather than at the centre, she maintained a distinguished career, and her long collaboration with The New Yorker ensured some financial stability. For The New Yorker, she was a regular contributor of stories, while being free to pursue her art without considering too much what her market was willing to accept. This makes the assignment of her work to one ‘school’ or another difficult, and may have hindered her scholarly reception, which is notoriously category-dependent. Yet Warner’s works have always had faithful readers, and this republication of Kingdoms of Elfin by Handheld Press gives new readers the opportunity to encounter her original, engaging and challenging writing.