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8 8 Y O N S I T U A T I N G S Y L V I A T O W N S E N D W A R N E R H O W ( N O T ) T O B E C O M E A ‘ ‘ C L A S S I C ’ ’ W R I T E R E L I Z A B E T H P O W E R S A commonplace of criticism of the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) is the neglect of a writer who deserves to be more widely appreciated. In a 1983 overview in The Nation magazine, the poet-critic Richard Howard opened as follows: ‘‘She has no critical cachet whatever, this writer.’’ He had in mind the five books of poetry, seven novels, and nine collections of short stories by the English writer. Probably few people know that her first novel, Lolly Willowes, was the inaugural selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1926, but American readers of an earlier generation might have read one of her short stories in The New Yorker, which for forty years, beginning in 1936, published over 150 of them. During World War II, these stories provided something of a conduit of information about British domestic life. Warner’s editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell, was himself an author, as well as a legendary editor, and was responsible for an edition of their correspondence and for shepherding the publication of several collections of her short stories. When the feminist publisher Virago began reprinting Warner’s novels in the late 1970s – the short and whimsical tales that would make up Kingdoms of Elfin were just then appearing in The New 8 9 R Yorker – none of her novels remained in print in the United States. Only in 1989, with the appearance of Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography, by Claire Harman, did Warner’s neglect begin to be reversed. (A new edition appeared in 2015.) In the same period, Warner was recuperated as a ‘‘woman writer’’ and, latterly, her work has found a place in gender studies. Attention has been paid to her long-term relationship with the poet Valentine Ackland (1908–1969). The back cover of Susanna Pinney’s collection of the Warner-Ackland letters, I’ll Stand by You, calls it ‘‘the most detailed personal account of a lesbian relationship [in] this century.’’ In recent years Marxist and postcolonial scholarship has discovered a rich mine in two of Warner’s novels, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927) and Summer Will Show (1936). The first concerns a conflicted missionary to a South Sea island who falls in love with a native boy and loses his faith. The second, a historical novel set during the 1848 revolution in France, is about (among other things) a love a√air between two women that ends with one of its heroines taking in hand Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. But what is one to make, for instance, of the 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them, which takes place in a twelfth-century convent in Norfolk? With her novels ranging magpie-like over time and terrain, it seems di≈cult to situate Warner as a writer, and scholarly interest perforce focuses on individual works rather than her entire corpus. Warner’s life also exhibits a magpie quality. She grew up homeschooled on the grounds of Harrow School, where her father was a master. During World War I she worked in a munitions factory. It is often repeated, although not proven, that she had hoped to study music composition with Arnold Schoenberg in Germany, a plan that was thwarted because of the outbreak of World War I. For the next decade, she was part of the editorial team that produced Oxford University Press’s ten-volume collection Tudor Church Music. For this project, she made solitary trips to village chapels and churches in search of long-forgotten manuscripts. It was during this period that her writing career began with two volumes of poetry, in the Georgian mode, followed by Lolly Willowes in 1926. In the 1920s she contributed to many periodicals, including...

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