It was its own hawk. But manned hawks must often rise over Foxcastle. Fairies were known to go hawking, using merlins, he supposed, to bring down larks: a merlin would be proportionate. Angus the shepherd, who had seen a fairy, said it was a head taller than the tallest thistle, portly, and holding itself very stately and erect. So much for sleeping in a snake’s cast weed! But poets always spin nonsense out of reality, piling Pelion on Ossa for a giant, whitening a lady’s hand to new-fallen snow. There was considerable variance about the Elfin complexion, authentic reports ranging from pallor to gipsy swarthiness. The fairies who came out of a hill in Suffolk were green. Other authorities held that they are invisible to mortal eyes, or only to be seen at dusk, when colours would be muted. Angus had seen his thistle fairy at dusk.

When the baby was lifted from the cradle, he began to whimper. When he felt the rain on his face, he began to bellow. ‘Nothing wrong with his lungs,’ said the footman to the nurse. They spread their wings, they rose in the air. They carried the baby over a birchwood, over an oakwood, over a firwood. Beyond the firwood was a heath, on the heath was a grassy green hill. ‘Elfhame at last,’ said the nurse. They folded their wings and alighted. A door opened in the hillside and they carried the baby in. It stared at the candles and the silver tapestries, left off bellowing, and sneezed. (1)

Kingdoms of Elfin displays Warner’s characteristic command of meticulous narrative technique, but it breaks a fundamental rule for fiction. Warner insisted that these stories were skeletal writing: ‘there is practically no flesh on it at all, and no breath of human kindness. But it seems to me that the bones live’. Kingdoms of Elfin is an experiment in reduction: the excision of all empathy from the narrative. The stories do feature creatures endowed with a variety of emotions, and empathy may well reside in the heart of the reader, but at no point must there be any ‘breath of human kindness’ in the narrative itself. ‘The One and the Other’ gives us a good sense of what lies ahead in its opening paragraph:

The sixteen stories that were for the most part first published in The New Yorker would come together in Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), the last of her books that Warner would see published in her lifetime. They are indeed different, though her willingness to be intrigued by the fairy world dates back to the 1920s, anticipating much of what was to concern her in the 1960s and 1970s. Warner was prodigiously productive and versatile, as well as a consistently stubborn writer. Her works include seven novels, roughly 150 short stories, many essays and lecture scripts, a biography, and the moving collection of the letters exchanged over a lifetime between herself and Valentine Ackland, which she prepared for publication after Ackland’s death.