The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Viking Adult

In addition to publishing some twenty books, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote thousands of letters, mainly to close friends and acquaintances, and these provide a record of almost fifty years of the writer’s life. 
Her interests are wide-ranging, and we read of such diverse subjects as the pleasures of travel, Proust’s shortcomings as a literary critic, current politics, Rupert Brooke at the Café Royal, an eccentric moorhen, and the Spanish Civil War.\nIncludes index and introduction by William Maxwell.

Letters

Literature & Fiction

Chatto&Windus

One thing leading to another, and other stories (The Women's Press fiction)

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Women's Press Ltd.

Selected Poems

Poetry

Carcanet Press Ltd.

Erudite, witty and scholarly, Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most remarkable writers of the last century. It is clear from her essays on female revolutionaries, her dispatches from the Spanish Civil War and her articles on rural deprivation that ‘her heart was with the hunted, always’.These pieces, brought together for the first time, appear alongside her monograph on Jane Austen, the ‘Tristram Shandyan’ portrait of her early mentor Theodore Powys and a charming introduction to selections from Gilbert White, ‘The Portrait of a Tortoise’, as well as a number of previously unpublished articles on the historical novel, women as writers and reflections on her own life in literature.

With the Hunted: Selected Writings Sylvia Townsend Warner

Essays & Correspondence

Black Dog Books

Lolly Willowes

Book-of-the-Month

The Flint Anchor

Virago Press Ltd.

John Barnard, a leading merchant, is a pillar of 19th century rectitude. Though stern with his tippling wife, he is undermined by helpless love for his cold-hearted daughter and the engaging weakling Thomas Kettle.

The Flint Anchor (Virago Modern Classics)

Contemporary

Virago

This book collects twenty-two stories dating from 1940 to 1946. Some were reprinted in two volumes, A Garland of Straw in 1943 and The Museum of Cheats in 1947, and one or two have appeared in anthologies since.\nLydia Fellgett writes in her Persephone Preface: ‘These stories show a writer seeking to understand what life was like in Britain at war. She worked quickly, without the haze of nostalgia, and (unlike her novels, which moved between the centuries) they were always contemporary, reflecting the texture of what was happening at that moment in time. Her wartime stories therefore epitomise what the historian Juliet Gardiner calls “fingertip history”: a telling of an age that is so close that you can still just about touch it.\n‘Almost all the stories are set in the market towns and villages of Southern England’s countryside, with a few recurring characters providing snapshots of communities of women throughout the war. Occasionally a British reader senses a direct explanation of some quirk of specifically English culture for Warner’s American audience but, generally, the appeal they held for the New Yorker readership then carries over to the appeal they hold for a twenty-first century Persephone reader today. Funny, brilliantly written, at times utterly heart-breaking, delightfully sharp, dry, intelligent and full of memorable characters: they are stories that strike the reader as somehow true as only the best fiction can.'

English Climate: Wartime Stories

Persephone Books

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Books by Sylvia Townsend Warner