Upper-class fairies don’t fly.  It’s considered déclassé. When they do fly, they are discreet.

In this whimsical collection of short stories, Sylvia Townsend Warner invents a world that is comical, fantastic, and macabre.  In the 1970s William Maxwell, her editor at The New Yorker, published 14 of the stories.  Then Mr. Shawn decided he had had enough of Elfin.  Warner wrote to her friend Mavis Gallant:  “Mr. Shawn doesn’t like me…  ”.

Best-known as the author of Lolly Willowes, a novel in which a spinster becomes a witch, Warner is no stranger to fantasy. In Kingdoms of Elfin, she describes the elaborate etiquette of the fairy kingdoms. She dazzles with details and then unmasks the coldness and artifice.

  In “Winged Creatures,” Warner explores the relationship between fairies and changelings. It begins with a birth. Lady Fides, an ornithologist, is flabbergasted when she has a baby.  Fairies rarely have children, and she has no idea who the father is. (“’My wretched memory,’” she explained.”) 

Because of her dedication to ornithology, Lady Fides promptly forgets the existence of her son Grive. She leaves him alone at home while she works.  Gobelet, her human servant, a changeling, takes pity on Grive. He makes him a shepherd’s pipe, teaches him to hunt,  and tells stories.  Later, they invent a long saga in which they are the last survivors on Earth except for dragons and extraordinary talking animals.

Fairies live very long lives, and they think humans are cute, but they do not like the spectre of mortality. Hence they expel the changelings when they get their first gray hair. When Lady Fides says Gobelet must leave, Grive argues that it is cruel to banish Gobelet from his home. The separation is cruel to changeling and fairy both.  But a happy twist reunites them at the end out of macabre circumstances.

In Warner’s buoyant story, “The Blameless Triangle,” the fairy queen of a small Elfin kingdom is bitten by a mouse and departs to an Elfin health resort to recover.  She takes most of the court with her, but leaves behind five “discards,” all males. Four of them used to be Royal Favorites. “All had proved disappointments.”  The fifth broke out with an anxiety rash:  he was also a disappointment.

What do these five men do with their time?  They meditate and discuss philosophy.  They they set out on a quest, and find a neglected church to live in. Their idyll comes to an abrupt end after they scare off the gypsies and watch a priest do an exorcism, but the philosophical discards enjoyed it while they had it.

In one of the oddest stories, “The Late Sir Glamie,” the fairies are discombobulated by frequent sightings of the ghost of Sir Glamie, the former Lord Chamberlain of the Elfin Court of Rings in Gallway. Fairies are mortal, but do not believe in the afterlife. This hilarious story is an exercise in ghostly etiquette. 

This is a classic – the style is positively acrobatic! She is also a great novelist.