Word: warners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sylvia Townsend Warner...
Sylvia Townsend Warner wore the disguise of an English country gentlewoman. These essays of reminiscence that she wrote from 1936 to 1973 seem to be dressed in tweeds and sensible walking shoes, with a faint, agreeable odor of dog hovering above the pages...
...best tradition of her genre, Warner recalls old gardens and village churches and eccentric nannies and a dotty old major, a bit the worse for duty in India, and, yes, her dogs. When she died in the Dorset village of Maiden Newton in 1978, discreet as an old teacup at the age of 84, she already passed for an Edwardian relic, inhabiting, in her own words, a "long, long ago, when there was a Tzar in Russia, and scarcely an automobile or a divorced person in Mayfair...
Those who have read any of Warner's eight volumes of short stories or six volumes of poetry or seven novels will not be deceived by her prim persona. In her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she wrote with quiet fierceness of a "genteel spinster" who chooses "to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others," even if the price be a compact with the devil...
...casual reader of these essays who thinks he is strolling down the garden path of English whimsy will soon find his heels being nipped by demons. Like the Irish country house of Cousin Ursula, the Warner world is haunted. Exotic objects like an old sedan chair mysteriously move themselves about at night. Can it all be explained by muscular rats...