The Music at Long Verney

“The stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner stick up from The New Yorker’s fluent fiction-stream with a certain stony air of mastery… They are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new, unseen, developments … [Her) genius is an uncannily equable openness to human data, and beneath her refined witchery lies a strange freshness one can only call, in praise, primitive.”
-John Updike
Of the twentieth century’s many great story-tellers, Sylvia Townsend Warner was the supreme enchantress. In The Music at Long Verney she again casts her spell, and Time has not diminished the power of her magic.
The twenty short stories collected here span five decades, from 1929 to 1977. Most of them first appeared in The New Yorker, and all of them appear here in book form for the first time. They are crowded with irrepressible, living characters and equally animated objects and incidents. There are stories of romantic love and the mysteries of marriage; of artists who speak the truth even as they distort reality; of gardens and houses and very fine things and of those who fancy themselves their owners. The centerpiece of the collection is a series of five linked comic episodes concerning an eccentric London establishment, the Abbey Antique Galleries, and its singular proprietor, the urbane Mr. Edom — not to mention its uncontrollable inventory, staff, and clientele.
William Maxwell, her longtime editor at The New Yorker, once wrote of Warner: “She had a connoisseur’s eye for the bogus, and a hatred of the assumptions of privilege. Her heart was with the hunted, always. Along with an extraordinary fancy she had a deep understanding of human be-havior, so that nothing, no feeling, scemed beyond the reach of her imagination. She had the true novelist’s awareness of the wheel (the image is hers turning and turning in ‘the bright implacable river’ of life.” All of this is on display in this volume of masterly stories – some of them hilarious, others hauntingly lyrical, all incomparably witty and bewitching.