Warner maintained a close allegiance to historiography throughout her writing life: Kingdoms of Elfin is, among other things, an exploration of historical, regional and national environments. ‘History’ here means an especial commitment to historical materialism, the belief that the material lives of people, where their food comes from, how their money is earned, what their clothing is made of, as well as the general habits of a specific class or group, are instrumental in influencing what can be thought, felt, and communicated, and how. Warner returned repeatedly to different forms of the historical novel, for example her exploration of the February 1848 revolution in France in Summer Will Show (1936), medieval England in The Corner that Held Them (1948), and the world of the nineteenth century in The Flint Anchor (1954). At the same time, however, she would retain the autodidact’s freedom to bypass prescribed ideas of the canon. In her lecture on the historical novel Warner claimed that ‘when I was young, I read everything in the house’, and this seems to have set her free to seek and find inspiration where she felt she would find it.

It was from Dando, grown very old and ramshackle, that Beliard heard the same story in his childhood, and was immediately seized by a passionate longing to be nursed by a fairy. His nurse and nursemaids were fairies; his mother, Lady Pervenche, was a fairy of unblemished lineage; he was born into the most distinguished of Elfin courts; he had never seen anything but fairies—and he longed with childish violence to be nursed by a fairy. Now he was grown up, unassuming and short-sighted but for all that a credit to his upbringing. He had an intermittent ambition to play the flageolet, and used to steal off to the pool of Barenton, where he could practise undisturbed.

Foxcastle was a hill among other hills, steep-sided, flattened at the top. If it had been a sheep walk that must be long since, for the heather had taken over, covering the summit and lapping down the sides. It was heather of long-established growth, standing over knee-high on thickened stems. As he was forcing his way through it he thought that the Professor of History would be hard put to it to trace any Pictish remains. He was still relishing the thought when he fell into a pit. He had got into a formation of peat hags, which started up from the heather like foes from an ambush. The stagnant water streaking between them reflected the sky with a savage blue. He scrambled out, none the worse except for wet feet and a twisted ankle, and with a sharpened appreciation of the nature of moorland peat: dry as a bone above, wet as corruption below. Walking more cautiously, he skirted the peat hags, and sat down on the western slope to shake the water out of his shoes and rub his ankle. He had never felt so imperially alone. In all the wide expanse around him there was no sign of man. Nothing moved except a few sheep on the opposite hillside and the burn flickering and rattling down the valley between. He watched a hawk flying in wide surveying circles overhead, saw it gather its flight into a poise and strike down on its kill. It was as though this imposed an edict of silence; not a small bird uttered. After a while he saw it lift nonchalantly away.