Playing the Seraphine 
Frank Kermode
This is a collection of eight stories, the oldest first published in 1975, the most recent in 1999; so they punctuate the entire, brief career of a writer who never yielded to the temptation to go on until there seemed to be nothing more to say. Her novels are exactly long enough. They accommodate her unique ability to imagine and record all the necessary authenticating detail of her settings: Cambridge before the Great War, Germany in the time of Goethe and Novalis, Pre-Revolutionary Moscow. The achievements of the novelist betoken a wonderfully economical habit, but perhaps the trick is more difficult to bring off in the even more limited space of the short story; and it is true that not all of the tales in this collection have the fineness and fullness of the novels, though some of them have a touch of the same quiet power to astonish.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
At Tate Britain · William Blake
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
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