It is the end of this year’s reading week! I come to it feeling happy to have read so much more of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, and feeling I understand it and know her just a little better than I did before. This week I read a collection of short stories, Of Cats and Elfin, and a selection of her poems in Voices from Fairyland; I also read some of her letters, which were utterly delightful and revealed her as a kind and witty friend, keenly alive to life’s comedy, and her novel Summer Will Show, which I would recommend whole-heartedly if you have not yet tried any of her work. I also read the sad and beautiful memoir For Sylvia by her partner, Valentine Ackland; if you have read STW’s diaries you might feel that Ackland treated STW badly but this casts her actions in a more sympathetic light (ironically, since she is so hard on herself).
But what have you been reading? Here I shall post links to all of your reviews. Let me know in the comments to any of this week’s posts of anything you’ve written for STW Reading Week and I’ll add it.
‘It’s only two years since I discovered STW but on the strength of what I’ve read of her so far I have no hesitation in saying she’s become one of my all time favourite authors,’ writes Harriet in her review of Mr Fortune’s Maggot. She describes it as: ‘warm, witty, frequently surprising. Yes there are obvious parallels between Lueli’s and Mr Fortune’s loss of their gods, but STW is far too subtle and complex a writer to drive this home. Just read it for its charm and humour and wisdom.’
Harriet also links to previous reviews she’s written: of the short story collections Swans on an Autumn River, Kingdoms of Elfin and Of Cats and Elfins, and the novel Lolly Willowes.
STW wrote a biography of T.H. White and Simon of Stuck in a Book reviewed it: ‘I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.
‘There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.’
Hayley at Desperate Reader has read Lolly Willowes, years after first trying and failing with it. She writes: ‘What I really can’t understand though is how I missed the humour and sharpness of this book last time around when it’s the first thing that hit me this time. It doesn’t much matter because I got here in the end, which feels like the greatest good luck.
‘I'm really beginning to wonder if Sylvia Townsend Warner might be the most under rated writer though, and why that should be.’
lethe wrote about Of Cats and Elfins over at Goodreads: ‘Both cats and elfins are heartless creatures, and therefore perfectly suited to STW's sometimes sardonic wit. [...] Since we had a spell of gorgeous weather, I started off with The Cat's Cradle Book. [...] I liked them all, [...] especially "Bluebeard's Daughter". "Bluebeard" has always been one of my favourite fairytales and I enjoyed reading about the life of his forgotten offspring.’
‘I was hooked and mainlining right from page one and spent a wonderful week or so in late January, totally lost in the universe Warner created. Have any of you watched Bladerunner, with its AI replicants who were “more real than real”? Although the 
comparison jars a bit, it pretty accurately describes how I experienced the small corner of the medieval universe Warner creates. In this I found her skill to be comparable to the great 19th century realists, whose fictional universes are so skillfully constructed that we readers are deceived into thinking them snapshots of reality when of course they are no such thing.’ Janakay has written a fascinating post in which she not only reviews The Corner That Held Them but discusses more widely her love of STW’s books including her experience of Lolly Willowes:
‘I was totally entranced; I had simply never encountered anything quite like Warner’s combination of sharp social observation, realistic depictions of nature and delicate fantasy, all heightened by the mythic overtones of Lolly’s nocturnal ramblings through the dark woods adjacent to the village of Great Mop. Lolly Willowes remains one of my favorite books and I return to it every few years, when a certain mood strikes me; unlike Lolly, I don’t ditch home and hearth but I do spend a day or two immersing myself in that singular world that Warner creates in this wonderful novel.’
Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is over for this year, but Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work is for always and worth celebrating. To me, she is a very special writer who deserves a central place in twentieth-century British literature. Thank you for reading and for taking part!
