Abandoning time — his watch, ‘sole ally of his rational man’ (248), stopped long ago — Sutherland ‘lived a tranquil truant, dissociated from himself as though by a slight agreeable fever — such a fever as one might catch by smelling a flower’ (255).

The fever cannot last. He is cast off, quite literally, by the knitting Queen: ‘”And one purl. And break off”’ (259). He fell asleep in a wig and small clothes; and emerges, then and there, into an alien future:

The speaker … carried a most peculiar hat in a gloved hand. He had spoken to a group of ladies, who were even more oddly dressed than he, wearing white shifts down to the ground. Their waists were under their arms, the shifts fluttered in the wind and showed the shape of their legs. A couple of young men made up the party; they, too, had waists under their arms, and a general resemblance to clothes pegs. But all these were mortals. (260)

Clear-eyed, dispassionate, impartial — ah, but never cold, not unkind — Warner casts him off. She finishes the pattern that she had in mind, ‘everything exactly as it is’, the folly of both kinds intermingled, purl and plain. Like Elfindom itself, she means him no harm, no good. You could weep for him, standing on that cold hill’s side. You could weep — not for the faerie that he found and lost, but for the faerie that eludes us, that is always elsewhere. Take heart: you have this book.

Greer Gilman
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ingrid Hotz-Davies is Chair of English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tübingen. Her most recent research publications have been about gender performativity and modern women’s writing.

Introduction

by Ingrid Hotz-Davies

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”’.2 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’.3