All of this is described with profound detachment. We are made observers through the eyes of a narrator who may slip in and out of the characters’ minds, or choose to stay outside them altogether, but who at no point gives us the luxury of feeling with these characters. We may envy some of them for some of the time, find others disgusting, sigh at human or elfin folly, but at no point are we invited to ‘identify’, that staple of so much fiction, with any of them. So detached is this narrative voice that at least one reader has wondered whether the narrator might, at least part of the time, actually be a fairy.8 In their contents, too, the stories exhibit a marked degree of narrative coldness in that they eschew poetic justice, providence, or morally centred vision. Moral judgment is already prevented by the narrative voice remaining an observer, sometimes an amused one, but never one that judges, an activity of which Warner herself was severely critical. She thought that the injunction ‘Don’t point!’ was ‘sound advice and should be given more often and to all ages’.9