Welcome to Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week! (I feel like a game-show host, typing that...)
Almost as soon as I had decided to host this I was consumed by panic and also a weird reluctance to read anything by STW, as if I were turning her into A Project and thus draining out all the fun. I kept accidentally reading Edgar Wallace... Fortunately, I was able to overcome this reluctance and actually read quite a bit of her work so we won’t be confronted with an embarrassing blank space here this week. And after all, it has been fun and I am as enthusiastic about the work as I was before I began.
So if you haven’t yet started, do rush to your bookcase and seize one of her books and join in...
Here is the plan. I am going to post here six times this week. If you’ve written a post somewhere on the internet – your blog, facebook, goodreads, whatever – leave the link in the comments to any of my STW posts and I’ll collect them all together in the final post so we can find each other more easily.
If you don’t have anywhere on the internet, you can write something in the comments and I’ll copy/paste it into the final round-up post. Or you could email it to me and I’ll put it up here as a guest post.
STW wrote in different forms and I’ve tried to reflect that in what I’ve read and written about. This is my posting schedule. Excitingly, I haven’t actually finished The Corner that Held Them yet but am terror-reading in the hope I can have something ready in time for Friday.
- Later today: After the Death of Don Juan (novel)
- Tuesday: The Innocent and the Guilty (short stories)
- Wednesday: Selected Poems
- Thursday: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
- Friday (I hope!): The Corner that Held Them (novel)
- Sunday: round-up post with links to all your posts
So put up your feet with a cat or two to hand, pour yourself a generous glass of sherry and light a Sobranie. Happy reading!
(Sylvia Townsend Warner by Cecil Beaton; bromide print, 1930; NPG P182; National Portrait Gallery, London; from here)