Revived Writers
Fairly often a well-deserving writer is rediscovered by readers, publishers, or reviewers/critics. The neglected books are brought back into print, retrospective appreciations are written (Dawn Powell) or a sudden rush of affection overwhelms the writer late in life (Barbara Pym). Sometimes the writer’s works are whacked with the magic wand of Hollywood, and the writer becomes much more famous and widely read than in his or her mortality (Philip K. Dick).
Recently I was struck by the handsome editions that a British publisher, Hodder Books, brought out for Pamela Hansford Johnson’s novels. Johnson (1912-1981, CBE, FRSL) was a prolific and multi-talented writer who was the guest of many universities in the US and celebrated in her day. Her second husband, C.P. Snow, had an even higher profile as a writer bridging the sciences and the humanities and wrote successfully and abundantly, including an epic 11-volume series, Strangers and Brothers. Johnson is now back in print. Snow is out of print entirely in the US. Publishers — and booksellers — are mysterious in their giving and taking away. It pays to stay alert to what is revived.
On this page, beginning in the pandemic days of Spring 2020, we will hunt around for revived fiction and its writers. We begin with Johnson. I look forward to listing other authors I carry: Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, Eugenia Price, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and others. (Why are all the names I am thinking of women writers? No idea.)
Enjoy! Experiment! And come back to check on new listings.
Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies
Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies
The twenty-three stories in Of Cats and Elfins encompass scholarship (Warner’s ground-breaking 1927 essay ‘The Kingdoms of Elfin’, on modern Elfinology), black humour, the Gothic, and the bizarrely anthropomorphic cats of The Cat’s Cradle Book, which reflect Warner’s preoccupation with the dark forces at large in Europe in the 1940s.
The list of stories:
1 The Kingdom of Elfin (essay from 1927)
2 Narrative of Events Preceding the Death of Queen Ermine
3 Queen Mousie
4 An Improbable Story
5 The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo
6 Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain
The Cat’s Cradle Book
7 Introduction
8 Odin’s Birds
9 The Castle of Carabas
10 Virtue and the Tiger
11 The Magpie Charity
12 The Fox-Pope
13 The Phoenix
14 Apollo and the Mice
15 The Widow’s Portion
16 The Two Mothers
17 The Donkey’s Providence
18 The Trumpeter’s Daughter
19 Death in the Mouth
20 The Traveller from the West and the Traveller from the East
21 Bread for the Castle
22 Popularity
23 Bluebeard’s Daughter
Reviews
The Guardian liked it very much: ‘Each tale is a beautifully realised imaginative world, resonant with folklore and a rich appreciation of nature.’
The Times Literary Supplement found the stories ‘cut from crystalline prose, they are strange, wonderful and often wickedly funny, as when Apollo responds to a farmer’s complaint: “Stupid prayers are often soonest answered, for no deity can stand them”. This is storytelling as enchantment and it feels like an answered prayer to fall under Warner’s spell.’
The Fantasy Hive was keen: ‘”The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo” is a story of an ill-fated child’s gruesome transformation, with undercurrents of queerness and sly undermining of gender norms. It could sit happily with the best stories in The Kingdoms of Elfin, and makes the collection worth the asking price alone … The bulk of the collection is given over to The Cat’s Cradle Book. Warner, like most right-thinking people, loved cats and she and her partner Valentine Ackland looked after many. The Cat’s Cradle Book brilliantly captures the character and sensibility of cats. Much like Warner’s fairies, they are sleek, beautiful, charming yet capricious, and self-reliant; existing parallel but aside to mere human concerns. Warner brilliantly draws the line between the stark coolness of folktales and the attitude of cats by attributing her folktale-inflected stories to cats, reminding us that the earlier versions of fairy tales and legends are from an older time in human history, and are much concerned with darkness and death.’
Shiny New Books liked it a LOT: ‘can’t recommend highly enough’.
Desperate Reader didn’t want to stop reading: ‘it gave me that magical feeling of finding something that could have been written just to amuse me. It’s a sense of recognition within a book that I associate more with childhood and teen years than being an adult reader so finding it here was a real gift.’
Sandra Unerman in the BSFA Review said: ‘Cat lovers be warned: the cats die as often as other characters. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s settings and characters are both recognisable and intriguingly strange and her plots take unexpected turns. But her impersonal style gives her narratives a particular, sardonic flavour, which the reader can relish, while being kept at a distance.’