Editing Alan Garner (section)

===''The Stone Book'' series and folkloric collections: 1974–94===

From 1976 to 1978, Garner published a series of four novellas, which have come to be collectively known as ''[[The Stone Book]]'' quartet: ''The Stone Book'', ''Granny Reardun'', ''The Aimer Gate'', and ''Tom Fobble's Day''.{{sfn|Philip|1981|p=16}} Each focused on a day in the life of a child in the Garner family, each from a different generation.{{sfn|Philip|1981|p=17}}
In a 1989 interview, Garner noted that although writing ''The Stone Book Quartet'' had been "exhausting", it had been "the most rewarding of everything" he'd done to date.{{sfn|Thompson|Garner|1989}} Philip described the quartet as "a complete command of the material he had been working and reworking since the start of his career".{{sfn|Philip|1981|p=16}}
Garner pays particular attention to language, and strives to render the cadence of the Cheshire tongue in modern English. This he explains by the sense of anger he felt on reading ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'': the footnotes would not have been needed by his father.

In 1981, the literary critic Neil Philip published an analysis of Garner's novels as ''A Fine Anger'', which was based on his doctoral thesis, produced for the [[University of London]] in 1980.{{sfn|Philip|1981|p=9}} In this study he noted that "''The Stone Book'' quartet marks a watershed in Garner's writing career, and provides a suitable moment for an evaluation of his work thus far."{{sfn|Philip|1981|p=17}}