Sylvia Townsend Warner. She saw herself as ‘Frau Noah leaning out of a window with a coffee cup in her hand admiring last night’s flood’; I can see her as a clear-eyed river goddess, or the numen of a spring. Wise-hearted and well-tempered, she began as a scholar of early music, and her prose is formally Baroque. ‘Her heart was with the hunted always’, said her friend William Maxwell. Yet at eighty, when her mortal love had died and she was ‘tired of the human heart’, she wrote on the unkindliness of faerie. Kingdoms of Elfin is a last book as ruthlessly exquisite as a silver frost.

Her first is autumnal: Lolly Willowes (1926) is on the fierce joy of unleaving. Laura escapes the prison of a useful spinsterhood — life as an occasional table — to become a witch. She does no great magic — turns milk, stirs a wasps’ nest — only dares to set herself outside her family and society: to walk the woods at her will, to travel wind-borne, as a leaf does, and to sleep where she settles, in contentment at the roots of things.

Over and again in her writing, Warner would return to fugue. Her stories of Elfin, brilliantly witty and disquieting, are of captivity and flight. The cages here are courts, Gormenghastly in their etiquette; but glittering. There are no marvels here, save wings, which Elfins share explicitly with lower creatures, and so disdain. Yet rarely, they take flight. Here’s Tiphaine, the Queen of Elfhame, with her Thomas:

Once, they came to a wide rattling burn, with a green lawn on the further bank. He leaped across, and held out his hand for her to catch hold of. It was too wide a leap for her and she took to her wings. It was the first time in her life she had flown, and the sensation delighted her. She rose in another flight, curling and twirling for the pleasure and mastery of it, as a fiddler plays a cadenza. She soared higher and higher, looking down on the figure at the burnside, small as a beetle and the centre of the wide world. He beckoned her down; she dropped like a hawk and they rolled together on the grass. (23)1

They are not us; unless they are — at times — the wrong side of our weaving: turn the figured silk and we can trace the bloodknots of cruelty, the blind entanglements of custom. At times, they meet us with aplomb, as at the funeral of the gipsies’ Queen Jocasta: ‘As a mark of respect, visibility would be worn’ (191). They are not fey: not mysterious, uncanny, twilit, but ‘straightforward as the scent of a rose, as a wasp sting’. A ‘race of pragmatists’ (257), they see their glamour through our borrowed eyes, and break us in their curiosity: ‘when the brown bed-hangings from the Librarian’s bed-chamber are hung on the line and the dust beaten out of them, they are discovered to be cloth-of-gold and fall to pieces’ (199).