Warner’s two parallel literary occupations at the end of her life seem diametrically opposed: the painstaking and grief-driven autobiographical reconstruction of their lives in letters, and the composition of the stories that would make up Kingdoms of Elfin. These stories are so alien to human concerns that it has been surmised that Warner may have ‘wanted a change even from warm-bloodedness’.35

Indeed, the collection is profoundly disturbing because the centre of perception, value, and vision is not human, but has been replaced with a complex set of mutual observations, amusements, cruelties, and simple incomprehensions.36 The empathy Warner withdrew from her storytelling may be supplied by her human readers, who may feel that the stories, after all, critique cruelty and do side with human suffering.37 Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, for example, produces the following reading of the ending of ‘Elphenor and Weasel’, the first paragraph quoted here:

No one could account for them, or for the curious weightless fragments of a substance rather like sheet gelatine which the wind had scattered over the floor. They were buried in the same grave. Because of their small stature and light bones they were entered in the Register of Burials as Two Stranger Children.

The verb account […] marks failures of imagination and sympathy for those outside the community. No curiosity is voiced about the excess matter, and their bodies are classified erroneously in an effort to dismiss their incongruity.38

Failures of imagination and sympathy for those outside the community, effort to dismiss: the passage (and those preceding it) censures the characters in the story for their active indifference. But the narration Warner offers simply states what happened: that one species’ suffering may be another species’ matter of indifference, and not only among fairies. At the same time, the humans in the story, in contrast to the readers, are not privy to the extraordinary flowering of love between Elphenor and Weasel so that this ending also ensures that the secrets of the fairies are guarded from intrusive sympathy from creatures who are of next to no account to them. Positing the non-dominance, even the irrelevance of humans, is Warner’s startling anticipation of the ‘post-human’ moment: the realisation, which we are arriving at only now through an awareness of our Anthropocene age, that human beings are not the centre of the universe, and that they need to explore and accommodate themselves to this fact. ‘Bother the human heart’ becomes a parting instruction as well as an indictment. This last phase of her writing was indeed ‘Something Entirely Different’.

Works Cited:

Bingham, Frances, ‘The practice of the presence of Valentine: Ackland in Warner’s work’, Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893–1978, (eds) Gill Davies, David Malcolm, and John Simons (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2006), 29–44.

Datlow, Ellen and Terri Windling, eds, The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (New York, 2006).

Ewins, Kristin, ‘The question of Socialist writing and Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Thirties’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), 657–667.