Dorset Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner

In Dorset, some things don't alter

Shortly before Sylvia Townsend Warner's death in the late 1970s I was taken to meet her by my father, a long-time friend of the author. Her Dorset home sat spooned by a bend in the River Frome. As I stepped into the sunny haze of the porch I was confronted with a looming figure silhouetted in the long hallway, one twiggy hand tipped with a smouldering black Russian cigarette. Smoke hovered around Warner as her beloved cats, Moth and Pericles, orbited her feet. For me, such vivid impressions, steeped in domesticity and witchery, infuse Dorset Stories, a wonderful new collection.

From the 1930s through to her final years she despatched short stories to William Maxwell, who was fiction editor at The New Yorker, with the proceeds helping to keep paper in the typewriter and the roof over her head leak-free. Many of them appear in this collection, some unpublished since they first hit the Manhattan news-stands more than 70 years ago.

Country estates, summer lets and village shops (along with their eccentric occupants) were all grist to Warner's literary mill. The Honourable Mrs Benson, the mad anti-heroine of "A Dressmaker", wanders the downs in her ballgown trailing hands "with the unvarnished nails of those who have grown disheartened". This is a sour-sweet fictional world, in which no one gets off lightly, especially the gentry, who are brought up "taking snuff one moment and having their heads cut off the next". And although Warner lived with the poet Valentine Ackland in what would now be called a same-sex marriage, these stories illustrate little faith in matrimony. Mrs Benson ends up certified on her embarrassed husband's direction, and in "Such a Wonderful Opportunity" an old church warden notes "men always have their work, just as the foxes have holes" whilst wives are "left with all the real life part of it".

Warner's stories are undeniably passé, filled as they are with retired majors and parish gossip, but then they frequently were even at the time of writing. Some of these date from the 1960s and yet there's little sign of a world grinding to the Rolling Stones and a sexual revolution. Instead she created a musty and clandestine environment, like a secret pocket stitched into an old raincoat. As one of her ladies remarks: "There is something about being hidden that inevitably gives one the sense that it would be better to remain in hiding."

It's frequently the fate of such writers to slip quietly into obscurity, so it's heart-warming to find a small press keeping the faith. Warner fought alongside the Communists during the Spanish Civil War, protested against nuclear power and maintained a lesbian relationship during disapproving times. Fittingly, these tales prove that her writing has remained as sharp as a lurcher's bite.