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Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893 - 1978)
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 I'll
Stand By You - The Letters of Sylvia Townsend by
Sylvia Townsend Warner (Editor), Valentine Ackland, Susanna Pinney
Throughout her
professional life, Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific writer,
ranging among biography, novels, short stories, and poetry. As I'll
Stand by You, a collection of letters between Warner and her
longtime companion, Valentine Ackland, proves, she was equally
productive in her personal life as well. The relationship between
the two women was a remarkably happy one, and their correspondence
reflects this: one won't find much evidence of Sturm und Drang in
the letters they wrote to one another during their separations.
Instead, there are frequent declarations of love and practical
admonishments to dress warmly and eat properly. When Ackland died
after nearly 40 years of "marriage," Warner gathered
together their voluminous correspondence for publication,
connecting the letters with her own narrative and directing her
editor to wait until anyone who might be offended by the contents
was dead before publishing them.
In addition to voicing the intense passion
Warner and Ackland felt for one another, the letters range over a
wide variety of topics--from pets to politics. What makes this
collection of letters so intriguing is the wit and elegance with
which both Warner and Ackland wrote. Their relationship wasn't
perfect by any means--there was a lengthy period surrounding World
War II during which Valentine fell in love with another woman--but
it was securely grounded in love, a fact to which these selected
letters stand testament.
 Lolly
Willowes by
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner began her literary career as
a poet, and her first novel is as nimble and precise as poetry and
reads as if it might have been composed to a meter. Like some of
Jane Austen's fiction, Lolly Willowes is a comedy about the
perils, pleasures, and consolations of spinsterhood, and the
predicament of its heroine is at first deliberately and
deceptively commonplace. "Aunt Lolly, a middle-aging lady,
light-footed upon stairs, and indispensable for Christmas Eve and
birthday preparations," is nevertheless troubled by vague,
indefinable longings, a hankering after the solitude of woods and
dark rural places. At last a revelation in a greengrocer's leads
her to abandon her outraged London family and take rooms in an
obscure hamlet, Great Mop.
Here her neighbors keep curiously late and noisy
hours, but otherwise allow her to pass the time "in perfect
idleness and contentment." She is eventually pursued into her
idyll, however, by her nephew, and Titus's familiar small demands
drive her to rage and despair: "No! You shan't get me. I
won't go back. I won't.... Oh! Is there no help?" She
is promptly visited by a mysterious black kitten, who fastens its
claws upon her hand and draws blood. At once she understands. The
kitten is her familiar, and has been sent by dark forces.
"She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had
entered into a compact with the Devil."
She has, in short, become a witch--or, rather,
she has rediscovered her own slumbering diabolical potential, in
the unlikely setting of a Buckinghamshire hamlet that--as she now
realizes--is peopled entirely by witches. Laura soon attends a
rollicking but ultimately rather disappointing midnight Sabbath;
she is visited by Satan in the shape of a pleasant-faced man in a
corduroy coat and gaiters who rids her of Titus and restores her
to privacy and peace. She is left with a vision of the women
"all over England, all over Europe ... as common as
blackberries, and as unregarded" to whom he has offered the
promise of adventure, "the dangerous black night to stretch
your wings in." It is this vision that lends the novel its
subversive edge, that ultimately allies it less with the work of
Austen than with that of Virginia Woolf, and with later feminists.
They "know they are dynamite," says Laura of Satan's
women, "and long for the concussion that may justify
them." --Sarah Waters
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In the twenty years since the death of the
distinguished novelist, short story writer and poet Sylvia
Townsend Warner (1893-1978) interest has steadily continued to
grow in her work. Though she never found favour with the literary
or political establishment, her highly original and entertaining
view of society is just as potent today as ever, and her satire as
mordant.
A Society was formed in January 2000, to
celebrate all aspects of her life and work, and it has a growing
membership.
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Excerpt:
Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner was born on December
6, 1893, in Devon, England, the only child of George Townsend
Warner, a schoolmaster, and Nora Huddleston Warren. Educated at
home, she moved to London in 1917 to pursue a career in
musicology, serving as one of the editors of the ten-volume study Tudor
Church Music...
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Finding aid to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Papers at The New York Public Library.
Site includes a short biography.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
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