One Thing Leading to Another

Well known, and widely loved, as a novelist, poet and letter writer of unique wit and sympathy, Sylvia Townsend Warner was also a most entertaining and original writer of short stories; and this posthumous collection, which includes stories written from the early 1940s until shortly before her death in 1978, shows her at the very height of her powers, and indicates the breadth of her style and her sympathies in stories that range from the hilarious to the melancholy, from naturalistic evocations of wartime England to the imaginary world of the Kingdoms of Elfin.
Few have written as well as she did about the vagaries and eccentricities of individuals of indeterminate age and limited means, or about the lonely, the old and the voluble, surviving on memories and dreams of the past; few have had as strong a sense of the ridiculous, of the absurdities of human conduct; no one but Sylvia Townsend Warner could have conjured up characters like Mr Edom of the Abbey Antiques Gallery and the unpredictable Mrs Otter, or the extraordinary Finch family, or Miss Logie, the housekeeper to two priests who decide to test their tolerance by adopting an unconventional approach to cooking, starting with snuff curry and moving on to suet pudding with cough linctus sauce and mustard marmalade.
To those unfamiliar with Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, One Thing Leading To Another will be the perfect introduction; to those who already love and admire her writing, it will prove an unexpected bonus.