In her lecture ‘Women as Writers’ (1959), Warner set out to demonstrate not so much that women wrote, still less who the ‘great’ women writers were, if any existed, but rather how they wrote, claiming that they were ‘remarkably adept at vanishing out of their writing so that the quality of immediacy replaces them’. She gleefully demonstrates this ‘immediacy’ — a quality which she associates with the egoless artistry of women writers, and values highly — with quotations from women’s voices in non-canonical sources: a cookery book, Florence Nightingale’s reports from the front, a fifteenth-century letter, Julian of Norwich’s description of her perception of God. This virtue of ‘immediacy’ is very much a virtue of style, of a non-fussy, ‘immediate’ use of language, and Warner would have been her own best example. In a complicated irony she sees immediacy as the special domain of the marginalised woman writer, writers who eschew the pointing finger and dispense with trying to be ‘literary’ altogether, since this is tacitly reserved for male writers: ‘But I have sometimes wondered if women are literary at all. It is not a thing which is strenuously required of them, and perhaps, finding something not required of them, they thank God and do no more about it. They write. They dive into writing like ducks into water. One would almost think it came naturally to them — at any rate as naturally as plain sewing’.

Beliard woke the next morning with the agreeable thought of having something to do. As he neared the kennels he heard hammerings: they were breaking the ice on the rainwater tank. He remembered Dando’s statement that the pool of Barenton never froze. Dando had some scientific explanation of why this was so, which Beliard could not remember; he had not read the Cosmography very attentively. He decided that after doing the polite at the kennels he would walk on and see for himself.

Whether one sleeps in an ashtree cradle or under the thatch of a modest castle, a moist mountainy air is a better soporific than any good conscience. The Elfins of Castle Ash Grove prided themselves on being good sleepers, and had remarkably inoffensive consciences. Music was their preoccupation. They brewed an incomparable mead. They also prided themselves on being good neighbours: if a peasant’s cow strayed into their park, they allowed it to graze; if a peasant’s horde of children wandered into their valley, they sat in trees and watched them with benevolence. This did not happen very often, however; it was a poor countryside and thinly populated. As the martyred Irishman’s teaching spread among the descendants of his hearers, being an Elfin good neighbour became less easy: women pestered them with offerings, tied dirty rags on their trees, and dipped scrofulous babies in their brook; men threw stones at them, aiming in the direction of their voices. But the music and the mead continued, and the link with Plynlimon, and the satisfaction of knowing that they were instrumental in swelling the baby Severn into a real river. For though it rains copiously on Plynlimon, the contributions of their own Mynnydd Prescelly must surely count for something: if they had not all sung so powerfully to confute the Irishman and for the honour of Wales, the mountain—extraordinary thought!—might never have removed.