Sylvia Townsend Warner: a biography by Claire Harman

You know sometimes there are books on your shelves for years that you think you ought to have read? And then sometimes you really should have read them, cos you’ve done a DPhil partly on the author… well, better late than never, I’ve read Claire Harman’s very good biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, originally published in 1989. And I reviewed it over at Shiny New Books for the Christmas update, as Penguin have recently reprinted it to coincide with Harman’s biography of Charlotte Bronte.

Well, whatever the reason for the reprint, it is very welcome. You can read the whole review here, but below is the beginning of it, as usual…

This marks the third biography I’ve reviewed in Shiny New Books that is about a major figure in my doctoral thesis – three out of three of them. With Harman’s biography, though, I could (and should) have read the biography while studying, but somehow never got around to it. I knew (thought I) enough about Warner’s life from reading her diaries and letters, and essays about her; the biography could wait.