Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, published in 1926, is magical and subversive, anticipating the ficton of writers like Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Lolly Willowes, Or, The Loving Huntsman

The Corner that Held Them

Upset by the deaths of her children, Sophia Willoughby follows her estranged husband to 1848 Paris, where she falls in love with his mistress, Minna

Summer Will Show

In this delightful and witty novel, Laura Willowes rebels against pressure to be the perfect "maiden aunt." Not interested in men or the rushed life of London, Laura is forced to move there from her beloved countryside after the death of her father. Finally, she strikes out for the countryside on her own, selling her soul to an affable but rather simpleminded devil. First written in the 1920s, this book is timely and entertaining. It was the first selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1926.

or, The Loving Huntsman

Lolly Willowes

A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

The Corner That Held Them

The True Heart

Two novels featuring the troubled English missionary Mr. Fortune, Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The Salutation, take readers deep into the heart of a man in search of his own soul. Original.

And, The Salutation

Mr. Fortune's Maggot

These stories first appeared in the New Yorker and give an authoritive account of Elfin life.

Kingdoms of Elfin

'She has a talent amounting to genius' John Updike Don Juan, that notorious libertine, has disappeared. Has he been dragged down to hell by demons, as rumoured - or has he escaped? Doña Ana, the woman he tried to seduce, will stop at nothing to discover the truth. Set in a rural eighteenth-century Spain rife with suspicion and cruelty, and featuring a glorious cast of peasants, aristocrats and vengeful ghosts, this moving, surprising tragicomedy is also Sylvia Townsend Warner's response to the dark days of the Spanish Civil War. 'The kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans' Sarah Waters

After the Death of Don Juan

Lolly Willowes o l'amoroso cacciatore

William Maxwell

Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978

The Element of Lavishness

This Christmas, bask in these 'diminutive masterpieces' (Guardian) by the English genius behind Lolly Willowes. 'One of our finest writers.' Neil Gaiman 'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.' Sarah Waters 'Diminutive masterpieces ... Hand yourself over to be enchanted.' Guardian 'Extraordinary, lucid wildness.' Helen MacDonald 'Glinting perfection' The Times Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a café before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife. In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart's entanglements, from marriages and affairs to widowhood; and a champion of outsiders, whether single women, the elderly or wartime refugees. Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.

Winter in the Air

Looly Willowes

Shirley Jackson

Edith Wharton

Angela Carter

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Berridge

Katherine Mansfield

Mary Angela Dickens

Elizabeth Bowen and Kate Roberts

: And Nights by the Fire

Stories for Winter

'The kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans ... her sympathies tended naturally to the marginal, the vulnerable, the exploited, the obscure' Sarah Waters Sukey Bond, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is sent to work as a servant at a farm on the remote Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with gentle, unworldly Eric, the son of the rector's wife, only for them to be separated when their relationship is discovered. But nothing will deter Sukey in her quest to be reunited with her true love, even if it means seeking the help of Queen Victoria herself. 'One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers' Hermione Lee 'One can't be too thankful that Miss Townsend Warner has lived to discover the alchemist's secret of transmuting the past into pure gold' Hilary Spurling

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Books

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