(Portrait of Sylvia Townsend Warner, undated, from here)
In response to overwhelming popular demand (ahem!), I’d like to invite you to celebrate the life and works of Sylvia Townsend Warner with me this summer! As far as I know, there has been only one Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week, which took place in March 2015, so I hope I am not treading on any toes here. And I hope you’ll take part!
Why read Sylvia Townsend Warner? Well, let Sarah Waters persuade you, writing in the Guardian:
When Sylvia Townsend Warner died in 1978, she left behind her a body of work of exceptional richness and variety. In a career that had lasted just over half a century, she had been a talented musicologist, an admired poet, diarist and letter-writer, a political journalist, an occasional translator and biographer, a prolific short-story writer, and the author of seven remarkable novels, of which Lolly Willowes was the first. The intelligence of her writing has sometimes resulted in her fiction being misunderstood as difficult, and has perhaps lost her readers; she's certainly one of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.
Or perhaps Maud Ellmann, writing in The History of British Women’s Writing 1920–1945 Volume 8:
Sylvia Townsend Warner stands alongside Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen as one of the finest British fiction writers of her century, and she also achieved distinction as a poet. [...] To put it bluntly, Sylvia Townsend Warner is much too good to miss.
Townsend Warner’s writing is witty, occasionally malicious, often fanciful to the point of magical realism, lyrical and melancholy. She writes about middle-aged spinsters, failing missionaries and abandoned wives who suddenly cast aside their dull or repressed lives and embark on a transformative adventure. The settings of her novels range from a fourteenth-century Norfolk convent to seventeenth-century Spain to a nineteenth-century volcanic island. In her collection The Kingdoms of Elfin she writes about fairyland in a typically ironic manner; in The Cat’s Cradle Book about cats. Her subjects are so varied it’s possible to love one novel and feel unmoved by another. Ellmann points out that although not ‘modernist’, Townsend Warner experiments continually with form and content, playing with the reader’s expectations. It is sometimes hard to know what to think of her work as she can be unsettling, twitching aside the curtain of dry humour to reveal profound sadness or suffering.
What should you read? Well, as you can see she had a wide range: poetry, novels, short stories, diaries, letters and biography; there’s even a book about Somerset if you enjoy travel writing. You can find a full bibliography (and information about her life, and resources) at the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society but here is a list of what I believe is currently in print (though a few are surprisingly expensive, I think they must be print on demand) and their original publication dates:
Lolly Willowes (1926) (reviewed here by litlove)
Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927; reissued by the NYRB with a novella under the title Mr Fortune)
The True Heart (1929) (reviewed here on Stuck in a Book)
Summer Will Show (1936)
After the Death of Don Juan (1937)
The Corner that Held Them (1948) (reviewed here on Vulpes Libris)
The Flint Anchor (1954; Kindle only)
Winter in the Air and Other Stories (1955)
A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories (1966)
Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)
Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories (1981)
Selected Stories (1988) (reviewed here on Desperate Reader)
The Music at Long Verney (2001)
Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2008)
Letters (1982; Kindle only)
The Element of Lavishness: The Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2001)
The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White (2013)
So come on and join in! If you haven’t tried her work before, now is the time. All you need to do is read something by Sylvia Townsend Warner and then write about it during the first week of July. Leave a comment here or on one of my STW posts that week with a link to your post – it can be anywhere, a blog, faceBook, GoodReads – or even write your review in a comment if you like! Or if you’d like to write a guest post here, let me know.