Winter in the Air, and Other Stories

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This Christmas, 'hand yourself over to be enchanted' (Guardian) by the English genius behind witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes.'Worth �9.99 for the book jacket alone (trust Faber) ... It's exquisite and shivery, just like the stories within ... By turns creepy, melancholy, horrifying, tragic and beltingly romantic.' Sunday Times'One of our finest writers.' Neil Gaiman'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.' Sarah Waters'Diminutive masterpieces ... Hand yourself over to be enchanted.' Guardian'Extraordinary, lucid wildness.' Helen MacDonald'Glinting perfection' The TimesDecades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a caf� before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife.In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart's entanglements, from marriages and affairs to widowhood; and a champion of outsiders, whether single women, the elderly or wartime refugees.Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Christmas, Short Story Collection, Book Club

194 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.

She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reissue of a collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories published between the late 1930s and early 1950s, many first appearing in the New Yorker. Townsend Warner’s settings are largely domestic and often centred on women. In these narratives Townsend Warner frequently deals in suppressed emotions, characters in a state of yearning for things felt but never fully understood or confronted. But mingling with the quieter, more reflective “Idenborough” or “Winter in the Air” are pieces that delight in the eccentric and perverse as in “A Kitchen Knife” or “Under New Management” which takes the familiar figure of an impoverished, boarding-house spinster but embeds her in an unsettling tale of generational conflict and murderous impulses.

It’s hard to know how to assess these stories, they're definitely very readable, I was impressed by Townsend Warner’s carefully-honed descriptions and vivid imagery, and admired her flashes of acid wit, yet I can’t imagine ever wanting to return to them. There’s something about the scenarios or the sensibility that didn’t entirely engage me. Perhaps part of this is how distant they seemed from my image of Townsend Warner herself, unconventional, radical, openly lesbian - at one point stalked by M15 for her supposed subversive possibilities. I can connect that Townsend Warner to novels like Lolly Willowes, but the people who appear in these pages seem impossibly distant from the world she created for herself. Perhaps that was part of the attraction, imagining herself in the situation of the estranged widows or disappointed wives she must have observed all around her, women striving for the conventional lifestyle she was supposed to desire, and all of them appearing unfulfilled, restless or resentful.
 

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection of short stories over a fairly long period and found them great for dipping into. Sylvia Townsend Warner has a beautiful, lucid writing style which always draws me in immediately. Many of these stories are ironic, witty and bitter-sweet. A few do have twists at the end, but others are really just snapshots of an incident.

I thought the collection was quite uneven, with some stories, especially the very short ones, not standing up quite as well as the others. At the Trafalgar Bakery, about a young woman waiting in a bakery for her lover, is a wonderful story which I would definitely pick out if I was choosing one of these for an anthology.) This story also features one of the most beautiful fictional cats that I have come across!) The opening story, Winter in the Air, is also very strong.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was the evocative title that first drew me to Winter in the Air, a shimmering collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories, recently published by Faber & Faber. Many of these pieces first appeared in the New Yorker between the late 1930s and mid-‘50s, and it’s fascinating to read them together here. When viewed as a whole, the collection paints a compelling picture of middle-class life in the mid-20th century, replete with individuals buffeted by the fallout of war with all its attendant losses. Here is a world of abandoned wives and widowed mothers, of bitterness and melancholy, all portrayed in Warner’s wonderfully lucid prose. There’s also something rather subversive about this collection, too – a sinister tone that inhabits some of these pieces, giving these stories a macabre or surreal edge.

As ever with short story collections, I’m not planning to cover every story in detail; instead, my aim is to give you a flavour of the highlights and what to expect from the book as a whole. Luckily there are some real standouts here, well worth the entry price alone.

The collection starts strongly with the titular story, in which a woman has returned to London after several years in the country. I love how Warner illustrates the difference between these two environments through her descriptions of charladies, neatly capturing the gossipy nature of village life.

A London charwoman does her work, takes her money and goes away, sterile as the wind of the desert. She does not spongily, greedily, absorb your concerns, study your nose to see if you have been crying again, count the greying hairs of your head, proffer sympathetic sighs and vacuum pauses and then hurry off to wring herself out, spongily, all over the village, with news of what’s going on between those two at Pond House. (pp. 1–2)

As the woman reflects on recent events, it becomes clear that she has been supplanted by her husband’s lover, forcing the move to London, which she handles with equanimity. Just like the furniture she must now fit into her city flat, the woman knows she will soon settle into this new arrangement. The silence of the room will not be intimidating for long…

A broken marriage also plays a central role in Hee-Haw!, another excellent story with a chilly, melancholy air. In this tale, a woman returns to the village where she once lived with her former husband, Ludovick, a successful painter who has since passed away. Their marriage was a turbulent one, ultimately lasting for three tumultuous years.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2023...

[Fiona MacDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming, gentle and well written stories of a simpler, poignant time.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story collections are probably best read slowly: it's nice to give each story time to sink in before moving on to the next one. But I found Warner's collection addictive, and I moved through it rapidly. Despite this rough treatment, the stories stood up well: she creates individual characters and personalities very swiftly, and each story is carefully balanced and atmospheric. The stories rarely have a twist at the end, but they often end with a moment of revelation or of insight. They were mainly written for The New Yorker, and they are all of a similar length and have a specific range of subjects. They're set between 1930-1950, and deal with middle-class English life, often dealing with lonely or naive characters. Within these limitations, they're humane, thoughtful stories, with moments of brilliant description -- the feeling of stroking a cat, of holding a good kitchen knife, of tea in a run-down hotel. I enjoyed being immersed in this world.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winter in the air
(ISBN13: 9780670774357)


winter 2012/2013
shortstories
fradio
under 100 reviews on Goodreads

[Margret Asmunds · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most beautiful short story collection I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Entertaining yet craftsmanlike. Warner was an undisputed master of the short story form.

[John Stepper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this collection. The word choice and phrasing alone is worth four stars. And the range of stories, with such diverse characters and themes, left me hungry for more of the author’s writing.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was a long time since he had been so rawly in contact with a woman; he was out of practice and had forgotten how intensely disagreeable a woman can be when she is not tamed into her duty of being agreeable.” (From ‘A Priestess of Delhi’)

Warner’s narrative style reminds me of a cat: sleekly purring along and then there is the surprise of a sudden claw. The other thing I notice about her writing style is her gift for just the right (but not the expected) word: for instance the word ‘rawly’ in the quoted paragraph.

This is a diverse collection in the sense that there are narrators of all ages and both sexes, but the settings and characters are unmistakably English. Quite a lot of the stories are focused on loss: of a person, or a home, or both. There is that mid-century, post-war feeling that life has got a bit threadbare and rundown. I wouldn’t say that Warner is nostalgic, but the world she writes about has changed - and not for the better. In one of the final stories, ‘A Second Visit’, a former military man returns to a house that he had to requisition during the second world war. He’s devastated to find that the house is now in a state of advanced decay; but his longing and nostalgia fixes on the elderly yet still redoubtable nanny (Miss Parminter) of the house.

Not so much loneliness but rather isolation and the solitary state feature quite a lot. There are a lot of cracks in the conventionality.

3.5 stars

[Joe Skilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He had only to dive into her silence, and he would find that he could swim.”

[Sennen Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, gorgeous stories about a world I know well and love despite myself (rural England). My particular favourites were The Children’s Grandmother, At the Trafalgar Bakery, Under New Management, A Kitchen Knife, Idenborough, and The Reredos.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m rating this for the short story The Children’s Grandmother which I read the New Yorker Fiction podcast. This tells the story of a strained family relationship between an adult son and his mother and the grandmother’s coldness and hostility towards her own son, his wife and her own grandchildren. The grandmother in this story is a genuinely terrible human being. She is bitter and angry from the sad experiences she went through as a young woman most notably the death of two of her own children. Unfortunately she also couples this with a vindictive personality openly wishing and voicing to her own son and his wife that she believes and hopes for him to experience the tragic loss of one of his own children at a young age because she is jealous and resents her own son having all of his children alive. The grandmother never repents of her horrific wish for her own son openly wishing him ill will and suffering on her death bed as she is dying so she never becomes an ethical or good person. The life she had she has squandered by living so much in fear of death and disease (as her own children died of an illness that so much so that many years before her death she stopped being alive. An effective commentary on why death and mourning someone in their old age especially a family member or extended family member can be complicated and how unfounded beliefs and paranoia can damage relationships and perpetuate suffering.

[Nicole Witen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was thinking it's actually quite rare that I rate a collection of short stories 5-stars. Short stories are not my favourite format of literature, and I do rarely pick up a collection. I have, on multiple occasions, contemplated picking up Warner's collection, but have chosen to put it back on the shelf. For various reason, I picked up this book this month, and I have no regrets.

Some of these stories have made an indelible impression on me, The Kitchen Knife in particular. I liked the way each story somehow caught a flicker, a glance into the female psyche, but without being overbearing or off-putting in anyway. I found the collection unusual because of the deft handling of each character in each story. Each person felt so uniquely different - amazing writing.

Extremely well-written, poignant collection of stories. I hope to read more of Warner works in the near future. Highly recommend.

[Magdalena Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't like the fact that I didn’t love this book. I looooooove Lolly Willowes and was so excited to read some stories from Sylvia Townsend Warner - and look at that cover! The collection has 18 short stories and although they are well-written, the majority is painfully bland and forgettable... The only one that really stands out and is brilliant is "At the Trafalgar Bakery". "A Kitchen Knife" was also pretty good, but otherwise these stories were just ok. Meh.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up in a bookshop last year because I'd enjoyed Lolly Willowes and because it has one of the most beautiful covers ever. I read it one story at a time over a month or so, not wanting to rush it. I love her writing and I can't entirely explain why. Not much happens in these stories, they're just small moments in people's lives, snapshots. But the writing is so beautiful and evocative that I just love it. I can feel precisely what she intends me to, picture every setting perfectly. I rarely give short story collections 5 stars but I just loved this, it was beautiful in every way, and I'll definitely come back to it.

[Tina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this collection to be a little too varied in tone -- some of the stories were warm, sentimental and cozy, while others felt far too quirky and strange. This made it difficult to sit and read multiple stories in one sitting, as I would finish a strange one and want to put the book down for a few hours, but then upon returning to the book would find that the next story was much more to my liking.

In summary, I don't think the collection works as a cohesive group of stories, but did enjoy several of them.

[Iulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first Sylvia Townsend Warner and what an impeccable stylist she is! It was pure pleasure to encounter her writing, to the point that I now want to pick up pretty much everything else she's ever published.

Apart from a few stories that, although technically solid and wonderfully strange, I couldn’t fully connect with (such as "Shadwell", "At a Monkey's Breast", “Emil”, "A Funeral at Clovie"), I loved them all. Standouts include:

"Hee-Haw!"
"The Children's Grandmother"
"At the Trafalgar Bakery"
"Under New Management"
"A Kitchen Knife"

[Catherine Oughtibridge]

Just because I had to write this as a ten-minute exercise for uni:
Building on the themes of return evident in previous stories, in ‘A Second Visit’ Roger Tilney goes back to a decaying house that had been requisitioned during the war. His nostalgic dream of owning the property is knocked on its head by the ever pragmatic, plain-spoken Miss Parminter. Ambitions popped, a new fantasy creeps into his imagination, Miss Parminter herself. “He only had to dive into her silence, and he would find that he could swim.”

[Annie Day · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book on a whim and in the end I was a bit disappointed. It may be the fault of publisher’s choice of material for this collection but a lot of the stories were set in a similar period and revolved around predictable middle class concerns. I also found the quality of writing to be quite inconsistent. The best stories were Hee-Haw!, The Reredos, A Funeral at Clovie, Under New Management, Idenborough, A Passing Weakness and A Second Visit. I would consider reading a longer novel by the author sometime in the future.

[Aniek Verheul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a bit conflicted on this one. I've really grown to appreciate short stories over these past few years (thanks, literature degree) and the amount of development - whether that's in terms of plot or in terms of character - they can cram into such a limited amount of pages. This one, though, seemed a bit empty at times. Some stories were great, others I frankly can't really remember. In total, a bit of a mixed bag, I guess.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of short stories has a promising start, but in the end, it was a bit subtle for me. I often found myself unable to follow the action, and not really caring. To be honest, I don't understand what took place in half of these stories. I loved Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner that Held Them, but it was hard to make it through this whole book.

[Simon Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so impressed with some of these stories that I was surprised that I’d never heard of the author before. They also seemed ahead of their time in terms of the contemporary feel of the narrative.
Some stories were a little baffling but on the whole this is a really pleasing collection of unpredictable, quality yarns.

[Ruth Lemon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this short story collection. Almost all of them are perfect little gems!

[Leonie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Short stories that don’t do anything outlandish yet still show humanity in all its squalid, selfish, dark self.

[Nicole]

Just not for me.

[Joanne Shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exquisitely crafted ephemeral little stories. Delightful to read and then they melt away like snowflakes.

[Mab · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, I really think Townsend Warner is an almost flawless writer. Not all of these stories are perfect, but her prose is such a joy, and her people so real. A beautiful collection.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful stories.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this was the 1950’s these stories might be relevant and interesting. But it’s not. And they aren’t.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5