This very pretty collection of stories was published earlier this year by Handheld Press (who also publish a companion collection, Kingdoms of Elfin) and it’s the book I’ve chosen to start off 2020’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. It’s made up of two parts: the first is hitherto-unpublished stories about Elfin, fairy kingdoms, with a story of metamorphosis ending it and forming a bridge to the second part, stories told by cats (and originally issued as the collection Cat’s Cradle). These two parts work very nicely together and are unified by a feeling that there is a great deal more to the world (fairy queens, talking cats) than most of us are able to perceive.
[William] Blake was fortunate. It is not given to many humans to see the Little People so clearly, still less to assist at their ceremonies; a peaked face looking down for a moment from the dusk of an ash-tree, a sudden small fierce nip on one’s arm, a vapoury streak across the snap-shot of a picnic-party... that is as much as the commonalty have any reason to expect.
Each of the two parts has some sort of ‘introduction’, to frame the fantastical stories that follow as some sort of ethnographic project. The first story, ‘The Kingdom of Elfin’, purports to be a factual essay explaining some characteristics of the fairy world and drawing some analogies with human societies. STW’s fairies live in rigidly hierarchical societies, ruled by queens and governed by arcane rituals – not, in fact, so very different from ours. In addition to the powers of flight (only actually practised by vulgar fairies) and invisibility, the Elfin differ from (most of) us only in that they are entirely without pity or compassion.

Of the Elfin stories in this collection, three are enjoyable but it’s ‘The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo’ which is truly great. The identity of the central character is built around his sense of his physical beauty and as a child, his mother values him for his appearance: ‘though he was now an expense, he might become an asset’. One day he is bathing naked in a pool when he is discovered by another fairy, Sir Glamie:
Overcome by the boy’s remarkable beauty, he had a rush of benevolence, and casting round in his mind remembered the worms, small and smooth and white, that fishermen call gentles, and impale on the hook when the water is too cloudy to use a fly. ‘I shall call you Gentle,’ he declared.
The fate of Gentil, as he becomes known, is not dissimilar to that of the worms: he is taken to court, snatched up in marriage by Princess Lief and forced to live with her in Caithness whose fairies survive by wrecking. There follows a tale of unrequited love, loss of self, a sort of redemption through the beauty of art. It is discussed brilliantly by Greer Gilman in the foreword.
The other Elfin stories strike a less melancholic and more satirical note. In ‘Narrative of Events Preceding the Death of Queen Ermine’ a fairy community is threatened by the development of a mine by humans. They hope that revolution among the workers will save them, observing the situation with impassive logic:
Every seventh day the wretched mortals, no better than slaves, were forced to attend a judicial review of their conduct. The solo voice harangued them on their negligences, in efficiencies, and lack of zeal. Then they were scourged till they howled and groaned.[...] After a final harangue and a final scourging, they were released, to limp and writhe their way home. No better than slaves, in the end they would take the slaves’ revenge, would revolt, kill their taskmasters, break the machinery and leave in a body. So it was merely a question of waiting.
‘Queen Mousie’ tells of a reluctant Elfin queen, while ‘An Improbable Situation’ relates a fairy’s obsession with a human philosopher. The ‘bridge’ story, ‘Stay Corydon, Thou Swain’, concerns a middle-aged draper who longs to meet a nymph. STW is drawn here (also in stories in the cat section) to the idea of metamorphosis as both release and prison, a revelation of one aspect of the self and a destruction of others.
And then we move to the cats. Their stories are introduced by a human narrator, who stumbles upon a
beautiful seventeenth-century manor house, ripe as a ‘pear’ and inhabited by an extraordinarily handsome young man and dozens of cats:
With artful inconsequentiality, [the fourth cat] said:
‘You should see my kittens! They’re wonderful – and what appetites! But praise be, all my kittens are fine feeders.’ [...]
It was then that I heard a human voice, saying: ‘So you speak Cat?’
‘A little, I replied. ‘I understand it better than I can speak it.’
The young man invites the narrator to stay and explains that he is collecting the cats’ stories, like a nineteenth-century collector of fairy-tales, with a view to their publication.
Alas, the ripe perfection of the house and this idyll cannot last long and tragedy follows. The narrator then selects some of the stories to publish – which forms the rest of this collection. This introduction offers some clues about how to read them: there are comparisons with Aesop, so we know to expect animal fables (‘although don’t run away with the idea that these stories have anything in common with the ordinary moral tales’), and mention of the ballad of the Twa’ Corbies, the story of Bluebeard. The young man tells the narrator that he was inspired to begin collecting the stories after a passionate love affair in Turkey with a cat named Haru – which introduces a flavour of the Arabian Nights and foreshadows elements in the story of ‘The Traveller from the East and the Traveller from the West’.

The stories are funny, sad, wild, unexpected. They may reflect a cat’s view of the world, although they aren’t usually about cats. Many concern gifts of one form or another – usually unwanted by the recipients. So in ‘The Widow’s Portion’ an old woman whose only joy is her miserliness. Accidentally, she helps another person, who wants to reward her. But what good are rubies to someone who enjoys torturing herself with avarice?
Life had no more joys for her. She no longer dared to take her favourite walk along the cliffs, in case she inadvertently rescued another benefactor. The thought that she was rich poisoned all her little economies; it was no longer a pleasure to find raw turnips gave her heartburn.
A hermit decides to share his virtue with a tiger, with unforeseen consequences. (Mind you, it’s hard to foresee anything in an STW story.) A fox becomes a saint, so that the Catholic Church bestow the honour of the papacy upon him in ‘The Fox-Pope’.

Three of my favourite fables concern monster daughters. There is the baker’s daughter (inspired by Ophelia’s line in Hamlet) in ‘Bread for the Castle’, whose great pleasure is to stroll up to the abandoned castle gardens and peer through the iron gates at them, longing to enter. But the owners of the castle return and order their bread from her father, who asks her to sit up with him every night while he bakes, and sing to him. He plans to make a fortune for her dowry and is soon obsessed with money:
These sums became ever more interesting to him. And that was a good thing, for lately his daughter’s singing had become so harsh and droning that there was no encouragement in it. There she sat, perched on the edge of the kneading trough, humped up with sleepiness, and wrapped in a brown hooded cloak; for in spite of the heat from the oven she complained incessantly of feeling cold. There she sat, with her staring great eyes, ringed around with sleeplessness.
Perhaps the girl will get her wish, but not quite as she imagined.
The heroine of ‘The Trumpeter’s Daughter’ discovers she is a changeling and is turned out by her parents. What will she do? How will she find her ‘place in the world’? And Djamileh, in ‘Bluebeard’s Daughter’, has inherited, as well has her father’s blue colouring, his Castle of Shady Transports. What else might she have inherited from him? In an STW story, you never know what’s coming until you have reached the end.
(All the illustrations in this post are by Arthur Rackham)