This morning I awoke to realise (1) it’s April! and (2) I hadn’t made a decision about Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year and July is drawing close for those of us with massed heaps of unread books reproaching us all around the house. It is time to Make Reading Plans!
Quick decision: this year I will once again try to persuade you to read some STW – but this is the last year of the reading weeks. Three is an excellent number and maybe it’s time for me (and you?) to obsess about someone new. Rallying my feeble computer skillz I have made a graphic which you are free to slap around the internet far and wide.
As usual, the Reading Week will fall in the first week of July – a time which has no especial significance in the life of STW.
Why read STW’s work? I refer you to my posts for the first week (in 2019) and the second week, plus all my STW posts and links to others’ reviews (2019 round-up and 2020 round-up), but in short STW was one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, distinctive, mordant and original. Her fiction concerns fourteenth-century nuns, nineteenth-century revolutionaries, Spanish peasants and English fairies. As well as novels and short stories, she could turn her hand to poetry and biography, and was a brilliant letter-writer. Her fans include Sarah Waters, Neil Gaiman, Hermione Lee and John Updike. Her biographer, Claire Harman, writes of her: ‘Every page contains something brilliant, arresting or amusing, and one comes away from it staggered.’
Reason enough to pick up one of her works.
The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society has a full bibliography, but here is a list of books I think are currently in print (with their original publication dates) – most of her novels have just become available in the Penguin Modern Classics series; some short stories (the fairy ones) have been re-published by Handheld Press (as have a collection of letters and a biography of Valentine Ackland), Persephone Books have published a collection of her wartime stories and there are four collections in the Faber Finds series:
Novels
Lolly Willowes (1926)
Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927; reissued by the NYRB with a novella under the title Mr Fortune)
The True Heart (1929)
Summer Will Show (1936)
After the Death of Don Juan (1937)
The Corner that Held Them (1948)
The Flint Anchor (1954)
Short stories
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)
The Music at Long Verney (2001)
Of Cats and Elfin (2020)
English Climate: The Wartime Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner (2020)
Poetry
Selected Poems (1996)
New Collected Poems (2008)
Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2008)
Letters
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)
Many of her books and her diaries are widely available second-hand too, and there is a biography by Claire Harman (who edited her diaries and her poems in the Carcanet collections).
You have two months! Get reading!