WARNER, Sylvia Townsend

Nationality: English. Born: Harrow, Middlesex, 6 December 1893. Education: Educated privately. Career: Worked in a munitions factory, 1916; member of the editorial board, Tudor Church Music, Oxford University Press, London, 1918-28; lived with the writer Valentine Ackland, 1930-69; joined Communist Party, 1935; Red Cross volunteer, Barcelona, 1935; contributor to The New Yorker, from 1936. Awards: Katherine Mansfield-Menton prize, 1968; fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1967. Member: American Academy (honorary member), 1972. Died: 1 May 1978.

Publications

Collections

Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman. 1982; Selected Poems, 1985.

Selected Stories, edited by Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell. 1988.

Short Stories

Some World Far from Ours; and Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain. 1929.

Elinor Barley. 1930.

A Moral Ending and Other Stories. 1931.

The Salutation. 1932.

More Joy in Heaven and Other Stories. 1935.

24 Short Stories, with Graham Greene and James Laver. 1939.

The Cat's Cradle-Book. 1940.

A Garland of Straw and Other Stories. 1943.

The Museum of Cheats: Stories. 1947.

Winter in the Air and Other Stories. 1955.

A Spirit Rises: Short Stories. 1962.

A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories. 1966; as Swans on an Autumn River: Stories, 1966.

The Innocent and the Guilty: Stories. 1971.

Kingdoms of Elfin. 1976.

Scenes of Childhood. 1981.

One Thing Leading to Another and Other Stories, edited by Susanna Pinney. 1984.

Novels

Lolly Willowes, or, The Loving Huntsman. 1926.

Mr. Fortune's Maggot. 1927.

The Maze: A Story to Be Read Aloud. 1928.

The True Heart. 1929.

Summer Will Show. 1936.

After the Death of Don Juan. 1938.

The Corner That Held Them. 1948.

The Flint Anchor. 1954; as The Barnards of Loseby, 1974.

Poetry

The Espalier. 1925.

Time Importuned. 1928.

Opus 7: A Poem. 1931.

Rainbow. 1932.

Whether a Dove or a Seagull, with Valentine Ackland. 1933.

Two Poems. 1945.

Twenty-eight Poems, with Valentine Ackland. 1957.

Boxwood: Sixteen Engravings by Reynolds Stone Illustrated in

Verse. 1957; revised edition, as Boxwood: Twenty-one Engravings, 1960.

King Duffus and Other Poems. 1968.

Azrael and Other Poems. 1978; as Twelve Poems, 1980.

Other

Somerset. 1949. Jane Austen 1775-1817. 1951; revised edition, 1957.

Sketches from Nature (reminiscences). 1963.

T. H. White: A Biography. 1967.

Letters, edited by William Maxwell. 1982.

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner. 1994.

Editor, The Week-end Dickens. 1932.

Editor, The Portrait of a Tortoise: Extracted from the Journals and Letters of Gilbert White. 1946.

Translator, By Way of Saint-Beuve, by Marcel Proust. 1958; as On Art and Literature 1896-1917, 1958.

Translator, A Place of Shipwreck, by Jean René Huguenin. 1963.

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Critical Studies:

This Narrow Place: Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters, and Politics 1930-1951 by Wendy Mulford, 1988; Warner: A Biography by Claire Harman, 1989; "Dream Made Flesh: Sexual Difference and Narratives of Revolution in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show" by Thomas Foster, in Modern Fiction Studies, Fall-Winter 1995.

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The work of Sylvia Townsend Warner has been rediscovered by a new generation of readers through reprints of her novels, poems, and short stories, mainly from feminist presses. Warner lived long enough to see this revival of interest in her writing, a fact that, as Claire Harman's biography suggests, both pleased and surprised her: "It is the most astonishing affair to me," Warner wrote in 1978, the year of her death, "to be taken notice of in my extreme old age." During her career Warner published eight volumes of short stories, many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine over a period of 40 years, and two further volumes were published posthumously (Scenes of Childhood and One Thing Leading to Another). Warner's work increasingly is anthologized in short story collections, such as The Virago Book of Love and Loss (1992), marking the recognition of Warner as a significant writer of short stories.

Unlike her novels, which display immense diversity in terms of plot, narrative technique, and setting (from Summer Will Show, which takes place in the revolutionary Paris of 1848, to The Flint Anchor, set in nineteenth-century Norfolk), Warner's short stories present variations on a number of overlapping themes. A central concern is often what Warner herself described as an attempt at "understanding the human heart" in all its complexity. Within this the stories focus on the relationship between art and life (often with a central character who is a writer, as in "Absalom, My Son"); the gulf between representation and reality (as in "Boors Carousing"); and the eccentricities and extraordinary moments in the details of everyday life.

While often thematically linked, Warner's stories range from longer and fuller narratives, such as "A Love Match," to sketch-like stories in which considerations of plot have been replaced by a concern for a brief, fleeting intensity and, very often, an elliptical and ambiguous atmosphere. A good example of such writing is "A Widow's Quilt" (in One Thing Leading to Another), which tells the story of Charlotte, a married woman who becomes obsessed with a quilt she sees in a museum, made for a widow's bed. She begins to make her own quilt, which she acknowledges as a mark of her desire for escape from her dreary, mundane existence with her husband Everard:

This was her only, her nonpareil, her one assertion of a life of her own…. She was stitching away at Everard's demise.

Ironically, the fantasy of escape symbolized by the quilt is not to be realized, as Charlotte dies before completing it. Her husband never learns the true meaning of the quilt, although he unknowingly comes close to it when telling a friend the cause of death: "There was something wrong with her heart." Just before Charlotte dies she drops down the stairs a paper bag containing threads for the quilt: "Two reels of thread escaped from it, rolled along the landing, and went tap-tapping down the stairs." The image of cotton reels "tap-tapping" away down the stairs captures something of the experience of reading these sketches, with little or no context for the narrative and many loose "threads" at the end of the text. The fantasy of escape is fulfilled in one of Warner's longer stories, "But at the Stroke of Midnight," in which Lucy Ridpath steps out of her conventional middle-class existence to take a new identity, that of her dead aunt, Aurelia Lefanu. The story explores the possibilities of such a change:

Aurelia, the replacement of Lucy, was a nova—a new appearance in the firmament, the explosion of an aging star. A nova is seen where no star was and is seen as a portent, a promise of what is variously desired.

While much of the narrative is taken up with Aurelia's new-found freedoms, the final section of the story emphasizes just how illusory and fragile the new identity, and indeed any identity, is. Aurelia befriends a cat whom she calls Lucy, obviously representing her former identity, and when the cat dies, the central character is thrown into an "agony of dislocation" from which neither of the identities seems tenable; "she could not call back the one or the other," and she drowns herself. The atmosphere of the story completely changes in the last few paragraphs: what has been an often humorous and fairly light tale becomes a disturbing, claustrophobic narrative of schizoid identities. As the protagonist feels at her moment of dislocation, "it admitted no hope."

"A Love Match" is a text that moves towards "understanding the human heart" when it is afflicted by almost intolerable suffering, the effects of war on a brother and sister, Julian and Celia Tizard. Both have been profoundly affected by World War I: he returns injured and traumatized from service; she has lost her fiancé in battle. They begin an incestuous relationship as Celia tries to soothe Julian from a nightmare: "They rushed into the escape of love like winter-starved cattle rushing into a spring pasture." At the end of the story they are killed by a bomb in World War II, and their bodies are discovered together. In a touching and humane final scene, those who find the bodies invent their own narrative to account for the scene: "'He must have come in to comfort her. That's my opinion.' The others concurred…. No word of what they had found got out." What is most noticeable about the story, and its source of power, is the lack of any authorial intrusion or moral standpoint in the text. Suffering and the response to it are laid bare for the reader without any comment, and with a sensitivity to the emotional needs of the "winter-starved" individuals in the horrors of war.

Towards the end of her career Warner began to write stories set in Elfland, and she relished the possibilities offered by the nonrealist text, as the narrator of "The One and the Other" suggests: "Fairies can take any shape they will: so much is agreed by the best authorities." Warner's last work represented a whole new beginning for her: "I never want to write a respectable, realistic story ever again," she said.

—Elisabeth Mahoney

See the essays on "Poor Mary" and "Uncle Blair."