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With The Hunted – Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Do you ever wish a book had been published a bit earlier?  I imagine a few people lamented that the first dictionary was issued just weeks after they’d struggled with spelling ‘sincerely’ at the end of a letter, or mourned that British Birds and How To Spot Them came out mere days after that flock of yellow-crested (or was it crested-yellow?) hornspippets descended.

Well, I’m feeling that way about With The Hunted – the selected non-fiction writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, recently published by Black Dog Books (their website here.)  If it had come out earlier, it would have saved me a LOT of time scrabbling through enormous, dusty old journals, hunting out articles by Warner, photocopying interviews from books, etc. etc…. But, truth be told, I had great fun doing that.  And now it is available for everyone to read!  Thank you Black Dog Books for sending me a review copy.

With The Hunted really is a goldmine.  I haven’t read it all yet, but I’ve read enough to know that it is an astonishingly varied and fascinating companion to Warner’s novels – indeed, I have something of a chequered relationship with Warner’s novels, and might find the writings selected here more consistent.

It includes so much!  Remember how much I enjoyed her pamphlet on Jane Austen?  It’s in With The Hunted!  I greatly enjoyed an interview from Louise Morgan’s 1931 volume Writers at Work, which enchantingly begins ‘”I wish,” said Sylvia Townsend Warner, “that I could tell you I wrote standing on one leg.  Then you’d have something really entertaining and original to say about me!”‘  It’s included!  Her speech on ‘Women as Writers’ which re-popularised Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – it’s there!  Everything from an essay on her grandmother’s experience of the countryside (‘iniquities she had thought of as rare vestigial occurrences in crime-sheets persisted and were taken as a matter of course among these cottage homes of England’) to her views on Daniel Defoe (‘there are some books, as there are some personalities, which one can open anywhere and be sure of an interest.  This, I knew, was one of them’) is here in this exceptionally wide-ranging volume.  418 pages never contained such infinite variety.

And then there are all the beguiling essays and reviews that I have yet to read!  The titles leap out to me.  I want to read ‘Are Parents Really Necessary?’ immediately; I cannot imagine what could lie behind ‘Not To Be Done in May.’  And then there are pieces on Saki, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens, Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter – what riches!

Peter Tolhurst – the editor of With The Hunted – cannot be thanked enough.  Not only will this book prove invaluable to future scholars of Sylvia Townsend Warner, who will not have the paper trail I had whilst writing my thesis chapter on Warner, but it is for anybody who has any interest in Warner’s novels, or indeed in early twentieth-century literature.  In this extensive collection we see Sylvia Townsend Warner as literati and as countrywoman, casting her eye over her contemporaries and Victorian literary greats, yet also the minutiae of everyday life and everyday concerns, with the same perception and humour.

Whether you love Warner or have never read her before, I think this is a wonderful resource to keep on the shelf, dip into, dip into, dip into – and marvel at.

STW on VW

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Sylvia Townsend Warner (photo source)

Sylvia Townsend Warner on Virginia Woolf

Diaries 26th
January 1942

‘At Boots Library the young woman put into my hands Virginia
Woolf’s last book [Between The Acts].  And I received an extraordinary impression
how light it was, how small, and frail. 
As though it was the premature-born child, and motherless, and
literally, the last light handful remaining of that tall and abundant
woman.  The feeling has haunted me all
day.’

Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Yes, the excerpt yesterday was from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1936 novel Summer Will Show.  STW has had quite a few mentions at Stuck-in-a-Book this year, since I’ve been researching a chapter of my thesis on her novel Lolly Willowes, and I read Summer Will Show for the same reason.  Well, it’s very different.  Warner is renowned, in fact, for the disparity of her topics – which include a missionary on a desert island, a medieval convent, a woman becoming a witch, and, in this instance, the French Revolution.  The only tie between her novels is her striking prose and observational eye.

Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset.  Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn’t seem particularly upset about it.  Indeed, it seems to be par for the course.  Warner expertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.
Sophia seems rather unfeeling at the outset – strict, rather than motherly, and without any noticeably emotional attachments.  Warner often summarises people’s essential characters through seemingly incidental – and here is Sophia’s sentence: ‘She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling.  A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her.’

She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris – but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband’s Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way.  Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better.  A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old; as old as Frederick or older – this was the woman who Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Ouch.  But doesn’t Warner arrange an image well?

Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband – even with the obstacle of Minna.  She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners.  The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it’s one of the things which makes Angela Young’s accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) – Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se.  Here’s another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much:

And with dusters tied on her feet she [Minna] made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird.  Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic convincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant – a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.
Indeed, Minna’s personality is captured most effectively when we are told that ‘she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery’.  Her dramatic nature captures Sophia’s interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion…  The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here.

I enjoyed the first half of Summer Will Show.  Warner’s prose is certainly dense here, not to be read speedily, but the dignity and spark of Sophia still came through strongly.  Her concerns about reputation in a judgemental aristocratic world were interesting and subtle; her relationship and re-encounter with her husband were vibrant and never slipped into the sort of unrealistic emotionalism seen in a lot of novels from the 1930s.  But… the second half dragged and dragged.

First edition (can be bought here)

Perhaps my main problem was that I’m not especially interested in the French Revolution – and I’m certainly not coming from the impassioned left-wing perspective with which Warner wrote this novel (although she later grew rather less zealous in later life.)  Understandably a lot of the action of revolutionary France takes centre stage later in the novel, and as the narrative wandered a little away from relationships, hurt, and pride – themes Warner explores rather masterfully – I lost interest.  And yet even in the first part of the novel, I admired more than I loved.  It was enjoyable, but I couldn’t respond with the fervour with which I greeted Lolly Willowes.  The writing was so thick, so relentlessly beautiful, even, that I felt exhausted reading it.  That can hardly be labelled a criticism of Warner, but it prevented me loving the novel deeply.

I have heard Summer Will Show praised to the heights, and thus part of me thinks a re-read in a decade or so would be a good idea.  I don’t thrill to the thought.  Harriet Devine has also recently struggled to love this novel, so at least I’m not aloe in my assessment.  For those more interested in historical fiction than I am (and it would hard to be less) maybe you’d get more from this than I did.  For the reader new to Warner, I would certainly suggest Lolly Willowes as the first novel – but I have grown increasingly to think that her greatest triumph is her letters.  I’ve heard people say the same thing of Virginia Woolf, about her letters and diaries, and thought the assessment rather silly – but, for Warner, the chief qualities of her fiction-writing (adeptness at unusual imagery; an eye for original perspectives) appear in her correspondences, without the flaws which creep into her novels.  The Element of Lavishness is still the best thing I’ve read by Warner, and Summer Will Show didn’t come close to challenging the throne.

Authors on Authors (Part 3)

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A lot of books I’m mentioning this year seem either to be about Jane Austen or by Sylvia Townsend Warner… so it is appropriate that one of them is Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  It’s in the same Writers and Their Work series as Pamela Hansford Johnson’s pamphlet, mentioned yesterday, and I’ll write a similarly swift post about it.

PHJ on ICB nabbed the Century of Books slot for 1951, so STW on JA will just have to wait on the sidelines… but I rather suspect it will appeal to more of you.  Austen has more adoring fans than Dame Ivy, but are also significantly more spoilt for choice… This is, perhaps, hardly the only or foremost resource for information about Austen’s life and work, but I am a sucker (as this mini-series demonstrates) for authors talking about authors.  The combination of Warner and Austen is my favourite yet, and I loved reading Warner’s thoughts on the various novels.  She more or less bypasses biographical detail, which was fine by me – there are plenty of other places to go for that.  Instead we get to read Warner’s insightful responses to Austen’s work.  She doesn’t propose dramatic or revisionist readings of the novels, but there are lots of gems along the way.  I loved this:

though
sense distinguishes Elinor Dashwood and sensibility her sister
Marianne, the contrast is between two ways of behaving rather than
between two ways of feeling

and, a bit longer, this:

Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Emma must fully conveys the exhiliration of a happy writer. As the arabesques of the plot curl more intricately, as the characters emerge and display themselves, and say the very things they would naturally say, the reader – better still, the re-reader – feels a collaborating glow.  Above all, it excels in dialogue: not only in such tours de force as Miss Bates being grateful for apples, Mrs. Elton establishing her importance when she pays her call at Hartfield, but in the management of dialogue to reveal the unsaid; as when Mr. John Knightley’s short-tempered good sense insinuates a comparison with his brother’s drier wit and deeper tolerance; or as in the conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma about Frank Churchill, whom neither of them know except by repute: Emma is sure he will be all that he should be, Mr. Knightley’s best expectation is “well grown and good-looing, with smooth, plausible maners” – and by the time they have done, it is plain that Emma is not prepared to fall in love with Frank Churchill, and that Mr. Knightley has been, for a long time, deeply and uncomfortably in love with Emma.

It is a shame, given Warner’s sensitive and alert
reading of Austen’s writing, that she does not recognise the irony
dripping when Austen wrote about her ‘little bit (two Inches long) of
Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect
after much labour.’  Read in context – or even out of context –  it is clear that Austen has tongue firmly in cheek, and it’s curious that Warner (herself so often ironic) does not spot this.  Never mind.

What I think I love most about Warner’s writing in any context – her novels, letters, this pamphlet – is her exuberant use of imagery.  I probably mention it every time I review something by her, but it is delicious – usually quite surreal, but somehow fitting, and often animalistic.  She writes extensively about Austen’s juvenilia, and says that they ‘have a ringing brilliancy, like the song of a wren’.  Lovely!  And later she writes:

G.H. Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to “follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s mild eyes”, was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen’s eyes are those of a hunting cat. 

Oh, Warner – you and cats!  She can turn anything around to cats, given enough time – and is thus, in my eyes, a kindred spirit.

As I said earlier, there are many other places to read about Austen.  This pamphlet was issued at a time when a more or less complete bibliography could still be compiled (and one is included – with less than three pages of critical material) but now it proliferates.  The reason I would recommend Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner amongst this extensive canon is for the particular insight one excellent novelist is able to shed upon another.  STW and JA have been perfectly matched.

Opus 7 – Sylvia Townsend Warner

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I’m reading around my next DPhil chapter, on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and thus there might well be a little spate of Warner related posts coming up here over the next few weeks.  I have an inkling that this might be one of those reviews which is very specialist, and might not attract much interest (1930s narrative poem, anyone?) but I shall plough ahead and see what happens!

I read Opus 7 (1931) by Warner mostly as a counterpoint to Lolly Willowes, but it is also interesting on its own account.  It’s a narrative poem, about fifty pages long, about Rebecca Random – an unsociable woman who lives in an idyllic cottage, ‘lives on bread and lives for gin’, and has an almost uncanny ability to grow flowers:

Some skill she had, and, more than skill, a touch
that prospered all she set, as though there were
a chemical affinity ‘twixt her
stuff and the stuff of plants.

Indeed, the most obvious connections between Opus 7 and Lolly Willowes are the countryside, and this almost witchlike ability that Rebecca has.  Flowers spring up almost overnight, and make Rebecca and her garden something of a spectacle for the villagers.
But the topic is really just a way of exploring the dynamics of village life, especially the darker side.  Rebecca starts to sell her flowers – but only because she needs money for drink.  The villagers buy her flowers for their mantelpieces, parties, and funerals – but do not accept her; she engages in these exchanges, but does not talk to the people next to her in the pub, nor buy them the drinks they anticipate.  In a really interesting aside, Warner leaves the stance of anecdote-reteller and dips into the author’s voice – comparing her addiction to writing and rewriting with Rebecca’s reliance on alcohol:

And down what leagues of darkness must I yet
trudge, stumble, reel, in the wrought mind’s retreat ;
then wake, remember, doubt, and with the day
that work which in the darkness shone survey,
and find it neither better nor much worse
than any other twentieth-century verse.
Oh, must I needs be disillusioned, there’s
no need to wait for spring!  Each day declares
yesterday’s currency a few dead leaves ;
and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves
the wind blows on, whilst I – new nets design,
a sister-soul to my slut heroine,
she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.
I rarely read poetry, as you know, so perhaps I am not the best judge of quality.  I recently wrote a little bit about Warner’s collection Time Importuned, which I didn’t really like or dislike.  I felt I got a lot more out of Opus 7 – perhaps because it had a sustained narrative, and everything which comes along with that, particularly the foregrounding of character.  Once I had that all set in my mind, I could sit back and enjoy Warner’s writing.  It was occasionally a little forced, and I didn’t approve of all her attempts to create end-rhymes.  This was rather inexcusable:

But now Rebecca, wont to chatter ding-
dong with the merriest, and when drunk to sing

But in general I found it rather beautiful – her use of metaphor is quite striking, for instance.  This excerpt isn’t to do with Rebecca, but concerns the aftermath of village life after the first world war – looking back to the war with quite a chilling, effective image.  Even with all the writing about the trenches which I have read (which we have all read, I imagine) this made an impact on me:

I knew a time when Europe feasted well :
bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood
so blithely flowed that even the dull mud
grew greedy, and ate men ; and lest the gust
should flag, quick flesh no daintier taste than dust,
spirit was ransacked for whatever might
sharpen a sauce to drive on appetite.
I can’t imagine any publisher willing to publish Opus 7 now, simply because of its form and length.  It’s not long enough to be considered a novel in verse, but it is obviously too long to be merely a poem.  However I am glad that Chatto and Windus decided it was worth issuing back in 1931, in their lovely Dolphin Books series (which I collect when I stumble across them) – it’s not my favourite book by Warner, but it is rather powerful and striking.  And, for a poetry ignoramus, rather an accessible way to enjoy the form, without forfeiting the qualities which make me primarily a lover of prose.

Time Importuned – Sylvia Townsend Warner; or, Why Do Poetry and I Not Get Along, Wherein our Reader Struggles With Verse

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Well, I can tick off 1928 on A Century of Books, because on Saturday I read Time Importuned by Sylvia Townsend Warner.  This volume of poetry was published two years after Lolly Willowes, an excellent novel about which I’ll soon be writing a chapter of my thesis – but which I only wrote about very briefly on SiaB.  I intended to write another post last year, when I reread it.  I worry that, if I tried, I would end up writing ten thousand words… well, perhaps I’ll give it a go one day, since the review I wrote doesn’t do it justice.

Anyway, I read Time Importuned hoping that there would be something useful to include in that chapter (which, incidentally, there was) but I can’t say I’ve converted to a poetry lover.  This isn’t going to be a proper review, because I don’t really know how to write blog posts about poetry.  I can analyse them in a doing-an-English-degree sort of way, and I used to quite enjoy doing that, but blogs are chiefly about reading for pleasure.  The activities of the student are not those of the ardent reader – I enjoy both aspects, but they are distinct in my head.  You don’t want to know what I think of Warner’s use of syntax.  You might want to know whether or not I enjoyed reading Time Importuned – and the truth is, I don’t know.

Some poetry I hate.  If it doesn’t make sense to me on three readings, I’m not interested.  If the poet name-drops all manner of classical mythology, I raise my eyebrows; if they name-drop 21st century technology, I raise them still more (these were both frequent crimes in the Magdalen poetry society I occasionally visited.)

Some poetry I enjoy.  But mostly comic verse, or things which are probably considered doggerel by those in the know (does Longfellow fall into this category?  Does Walter de la Mare?)

Oddly enough, I enjoy writing poetry – but I’m under no illusion that it’s very good, and I do it entirely for my own amusement or catharsis, as case may be.  Since I rarely read poetry, I feel wholly unqualified to write it, and a little ashamed that I have the audacity to put pen to paper…

Something like Time Importuned… I just don’t know.  The topics covered tend towards hopeless love and countryside matters, often combined, and with an atmosphere almost as though they are old wives’ tales, passed down in small villages for many years.  Which was nice, but I did end up reading the poems mostly as though they were paragraphs of prose laid out in an unorthodox manner.  Perhaps that is a valid way of reading poetry… but perhaps it also misses a lot?  I don’t know how else to benefit from verse.  I deliberately slow myself down, by mouthing the words (I’m quite a fast reader of prose, in a manner which loses poems completely) but I still can’t imagine reading a volume of poetry for pleasure.  It’s not that I need prose, because often I read plays for pleasure – and that’s more or less as unusual a trait as poetry-adoration, so I’m led to understand.

Well, I’m going to type out a couple of the poems which I did quite enjoy, although I am far from the ideal reader for them.  Poetry washes by me, enchanting others who dip in their toes, and merely splashing me slightly.  So, before I get to some excerpts, I have a question… which poet/poetry would you recommend to the prose lover?  How would you go about converting me to the possibilities of poetry?

Over to Warner…

The Tree Unleaved

Day after day melts by, so hushed is the season,
So crystal the mornings are, the evenings so wrapped in haze,
That we do not notice the passage of the days ;
But coming in at the gate to-night I looked up for some reason,
      And saw overhead Time’s theft ;
For behold, not a leaf was left on the tree near by.

So it may chance, the passage of days abetting
My heedless assumption of life, my hands so careless to hold,
That glancing round I shall find myself grown old,
Forgotten my hopes and schemes, my friends forgotten and forgetting ;
      But all I can think of now
Is the pattern of leafless boughs on the windless sky.

Walking and Singing at Night

Darkened the hedge, and dimmed the wold,
We sang then as we trudged along.
The heart grown hot, the heart grown cold,
Are simple things in a song.

The lover comes, the lover goes,
On the same drooping interval,
Easy as from the ripened rose
The loosened petals fall.

Between one stanza and the next
A heart’s unprospered hopes are sighed
To death as lovely and unvexed
As ’twere a swan that died.

Alas, my dear, Farewell’s a word
Pleasant to sing but ill to say,
And Hope a vermin that dies hard ;
As you will find, one day.

The Element of Lavishness by William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner

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38. The Element of Lavishness : Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell

I have had a very good reading year – so many wonderful books which have blown me away. It’s going to be tricky, compiling a list of my top ten at the end of the year – indeed, making lists of my all-time favourite books is getting harder than ever – but I’m pretty certain this volume will be featuring on 2011’s best reads (coming up soon). And it’s nabbing place 38 on the books I think you should read, but might not have heard about. Which means there are only twelve more that I can add – ooo! Thrilling, no?

I still have so many novels and stories by Warner and Maxwell to read – it seems crazy that I’ve only read two novels by Warner and two-and-a-bit by Maxwell, since I still consider them amongst my favourite writers. But even with these stockpiles still to read, I was delighted to discover that they were correspondents. It seemed too good to be true – that two authors I love should have collaborated on a book in this way, especially since Maxwell lived in the US, and Warner in England, and they met only two or three times.  (Most, perhaps all, of my quotations here are from Warner, but that is because I read the book whilst researching a chapter on Warner – Maxwell is equally wonderful a letter-writer.  Almost.)

The title Element of Lavishness comes from a letter in which Maxwell writes to Warner that:

The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy.  There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving is fifty-fifty, at most.
I love the ethos here: even if they don’t know whether or not their letters will be read more than once, fleetingly, it’s almost as though they can’t help writing to the best of their ability.  Evidently a lot of the Warner/Maxwell correspondence did survive, and it certainly reflects their talents.  While I love them both as novelists, I think The Element of Lavishess is the best thing I have read by either of them.  It’s quite possible that this post will descend (ascend?) into a myriad of quotations – so beautiful are the sentences these authors penned so casually.

They wrote between 1938 and Warner’s death forty years later, but only really became friends in the early 1950s, where the letters veer from the strictly practical to the lavishness of the title.  The relationship between Warner and Maxwell began professionally – Maxwell edited The New Yorker, to which Warner started contributing stories.  He loved them (I have shelves full of them, unread) and gradually this exchange became a friendship that encompassed not only work and writing but every conceivable facet of their lives.

Warner and Maxwell remained each other’s most fervent fans, and happy to express it.  Novels and stories were read and praised, always carefully and thoughtfully; Warner embarked on her successful Kingdoms of Elfin series expressly to please Maxwell – and yet, throughout, Maxwell maintained his role as New Yorker editor.  He praised and praised – but would also, occasionally, turn down submitted stories.  How strong a friendship must be to survive this!  How brave of Maxwell, and how gracious of Warner!  And how beautifully Maxwell himself phrases his response to Warner’s appreciation:

You have a way of putting praises that makes it hard for me to walk afterward.  My feet have a tendency not to touch the ground.  Listing a little to the right or the left, I levitate, in danger of cracking with happiness.  When one has been pleased one’s whole life as profoundly as I have been pleased by your work, one does terribly want to do a little pleasing in return, I mean I love you.

Naturally they did not solely get to know one another, but became as intimately involved in each other’s families.  Warner’s partner Valentine; Maxwell’s wife Emmy and his two children.  They often ask after these people, of course – but, more than this, they grew to understand and love these background figures to their correspondence.  I love this quick note of Warner’s:

I am thankful that Emmy is back.  In her absence you do not spell as well as at other times.  Does she know that?  It is a delightful tribute, she should wear it in a brooch.
Maxwell helped Warner through Valentine’s illness and death, acting as a necessarily far-flung support – and the exchange of touching, thoughtful, perceptive letters became all the more vital. For Warner, in her final years, to all intents and purposes widowed, the correspondence was a weapon against loneliness.  Those little observances and stories she might have told Valentine across breakfast became the anecdotes she wove into her letters.  This was possibly my favourite letter – indeed, I immediately wrote it down and sent it off to my own correspondent, Barbara-from-Ludlow:

All this time I was picking & cursing strawberries.  I had an enormous crop, & my principles are of a niggardly kind that can’t let fool go to waste.  But I got one pure pleasure out of this.  I was picking & cursing and searching who I could give the next lot to when I saw a paddle rise above the garden wall.  And looking down, there were two boys in a canoe.  So without explanation, I commanded them to keep about, & hurried (to Valentine’s workroom) for the shrimping net, and filled it with strawberries and lowered it down to them.  They were silent and acceptant; & it was all very Tennysonian, & I realised that when they are old men they will remember those strawberries.
(This was written in 1972.  Let us assume the boys were twenty years old, at the most – so they are now no more than sixty.  Where are they?  Do they remember?  I believe I, at least, will remember this quirky, moving scene for many eyars.)

Here, in letters, where Warner is not constrained by the novelistic strictures of plot and character and can instead turn her attention to anything and everything, Warner is at her most perceptive – and at her most deliciously playful.  She never writes a dull letter, and here are just a couple of examples from the notes I made:

Don’t ever think twice about asking me to amplify.   I love amplifying.  If I had lived when people illuminated MSS I should always have been looking for unoccupied capital O’s and filling them up with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and a pig-killing.

and

One of the emotions of old age is amazement that one was alive so long ago.  I suppose that is why so many people write autobiographies.  They are trying to convince themselves that they really were.
They are so lovable, so warm!  I want to quote to you endlessly – I want to tell you how Maxwell has ‘a defective sense of rancour […] the first thing I know I am beaming at someone I suddenly remember I shouldn’t even be speaking to’; how, when Warner and Valentine had a servant, ‘we used to count the hours till her half-days & evenings out when we would rush into the kitchen and read her novels and magazines: […] such a grateful change from Dostoevsky.’  But I shan’t – because I think you should just go and buy it yourself.   If you’re even remotely fond of Warner or Maxwell, you’ll love this.  Even if you’ve not read a word by either, or don’t even recognise they’re name, I would recommend this collection to you – anybody with any interest in friendship, literature, letters, perception… this book will delight.

Perhaps I should end with an excerpt from Warner, one of their early letters, which leaves me wondering quite how she would respond to my adulation:

But no reviewers ever understand one’s books; and if they praise them, they understand them even less.  Praising reviewers are like those shopwomen who thrust a hat on one’s head, a hat that is like the opening of the Judgement scroll in which all one’s sins are briefly and dispassionately entered, and then stand back and say that it is exactly the hat that Modom needs to bring out her face.  I have never yet had a praising review that did not send me slinking and howling under my breath to kneel in some dark corner and pray that the Horn would sound for me and the Worms come for me, that very same night.  The horn doesn’t and the worms don’t, and somehow one recovers one’s natural powers of oblivion, and goes on writing.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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One of the books I mentioned the other day was Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which I’m using for my domestic-space-and-fantasy dissertation. STW is one of those writers whose been in my peripheral vision, as it were – ever since I bought British Women Writers 1900-1950 ed. Harold Bloom – but I hadn’t made the move to buying or reading any of her work until Lolly Willowes. Which Hermione Lee mentioned in her introduction to The Love Child by Edith Olivier (and now, to go full circle, she is my supervisor for these two books and more).

Enough background. Lolly Willowes is the story of a woman who sells her soul to the devil. Like Lethe, who commented on the post about these books, I approached this rather warily – but it actually only comes into the narrative quite late, and doesn’t seem to me to be the central focus of the novel. The central character, Laura Willowes (the narrative never actually refers to her as Lolly, that’s just the name others give to her) moves in with her married brother when her father dies – she is one of those spinsters of the period who were shunted from pillar to post because they had the audacity not to marry. She puts off her suitors, one by indulging in the imaginative and positing one as a were-wolf. She decides, spontaneously, to move to a village called Great Mop (well, you would, wouldn’t you?) and set up a life for herself there. This does later involve selling her soul to the devil, unfortunately, but before it gets to that point I found Lolly Willowes a really interesting and sympathetic novel about the entrapment of families and houses and the freedom of Nature… that sounds very hippie, whereas I actually love family houses, but for Laura it is an escape from being trammeled down. And celebrates open spaces, beautiful villages and Nature.

As usual, the quality I appreciated most was the writing – and that’s impossible to define. STW writes beautifully, but not in the way of Virginia Woolf and those for whom the writing is central and the focus – more like an experienced story-teller, who knows the best patterns of words to evoke character and pathos.

I’ve been on a Sylvia Townsend Warner library spree, with The True Heart, Summer Will Show and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (which must be one of the least attractive title of which I’ve ever heard – apparently a maggot is ‘a whimsical or perverse fancy’) – anyone read these? Or any others by STW? I’m going to try and get through at least one of these next week – those in the know have told me that none match up to Lolly Willowes, but that was so very good that a second best could be enjoyable too.