She started with the short story ‘Something Entirely Different’ in the early 1970s, and from then on wrote in an astonishing rush, producing more and more stories set in the world of fairies. In this way, after the devastating loss of her beloved partner Valentine Ackland, and towards the end of her own life, Sylvia Townsend Warner entered new territory: Elfindom. She was keenly conscious that she was embarking on a new journey, a challenge and an adventure. As she remarked in an interview, ‘I suddenly looked round on my career and thought, “Good God, I’ve been understanding the human heart for all these decades. Bother the human heart, I’m tired of the human heart. I’m tired of the human race. I want to write about something entirely different”’. To William Maxwell, her friend, fellow writer, and long-time editor from The New Yorker, she wrote that she was pleased that The New Yorker would print ‘Something Entirely Different’ (renamed ‘The One and the Other’ in Kingdoms of Elfin): ‘I admire the story myself, and feel justified by it: justified, I mean, in supposing that something entirely different is still possible for me, that I can still pull an unexpected ace out of my sleeve’.

Hitherto, Elphenor, nephew to the Master of Ceremonies at the Elfin Court of Zuy, had spent his days in making himself polite and, as far as in his tailor lay, ornamental. Now he had to make himself useful. After the cautious pleasures of Zuy everything in this new life, from observing the planets to analyzing specimens of urine, entertained him. It was all so agreeably terminal: one finished one thing and went on to another. When Master Blackbone’s clients overlapped, Elphenor placated those kept waiting by building card houses, playing the mandora, and sympathetic conversation—in which he learned a great deal that was valuable to Master Blackbone in casting horoscopes.

The confidential secretary was again sent on his travels, this time to the Kingdom of the Guadarramas, if possible to observe an auto-da-fé and in any case to get details of procedure. It wasn’t the liturgical season for Acts of Faith, but he brought back details. They were simple: a stake, a platform, a sufficiency of ropes and fuel, an executioner. When the Court slaughterer had been disabused of the idea that he would have to cut Sir Bodach’s throat he consented to be the executioner.

Dressed in secondhand clothes too large for him and filled with pork pie, Elphenor entered Walsham Borealis riding pillion behind Master Elisha Blackbone. By then he knew he was to be assistant to a quack in several arts, including medicine, necromancy, divination, and procuring.