Description

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"A book for anyone who has heard the horns of Elfin in the distance at twilight." - Neil Gaiman

In Kingdoms of Elfin Sylvia Townsend Warner explores the morals, domestic practices, politics and passions of Elfins. She follows their affairs with mortals, and their daring flights across the North Sea. The Kingdoms of Broc liande in France, Zuy in the Low Countries, Gedanken in Austria and Blokula in Lappland entertain Ambassadors, hunt with wolves, and rear changelings for the courtiers' amusement. Enter a world where the fairy ruling classes are charming and insolent, and all levels of fairy society are heartless, in human terms. But love and hate strike at fairies of all ranks, as do poverty and the passions of the heart. Enter Elfindom with care.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's last short stories were originally published in The New Yorker, and appeared in book form in 1977. This Handheld Classics reprint brings these sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom to a new readership, and shows Warner's mastery of realist fantasy that recalls the success of her first novel, the witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes (1926). The foreword is by the noted US fantasy author Greer Gilman, and the introduction is by Ingrid Hotz-Davies.

About the Author

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Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was one of the great British 20th-century feminist modernist novelists. She was also a poet, a musicologist, and a Communist, and lived for most of her life in Dorset with her lover Valentine Ackland.