I first came across the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner about three years ago in a book on the history of Salthouse, a village on the North Norfolk coast. It described how she lived there with her lover, the poet Valentine Ackland, in the Great Eye Folly (later destroyed by the sea) during the 1930s. For a while I became obsessed by their love affair which lasted from 1930 until Ackland’s death from breast cancer in 1969. I read the letters written between the two women during their near forty year relationship. I also read Warner’s diaries and Claire Harman’s biography of Warner and visited Winterton-on-Sea where the two women often stayed after the war. I read as much of Warner’s poetry and prose as I could easily get hold of. As with many obsessions I thought I was the only one who had this preoccupation with a fairly obscure writer until I met someone through my own book club who had also done the reading and the visiting. Be warned, Warner’s life and writings can very easily become an obsession. For those who succumb there is help in the form of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society website (www.townsendwarner.com) which produces a Journal published by Black Dog Books of Norwich.
To quote the Society website Warner was ‘a highly individual writer of novels, short stories and poems. She contributed short stories to the New Yorker …..and wrote a biography of the novelist T.H.White.’ Most of her novels are now out of print but in 1993 Virago reprinted her 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them which is an imagined everyday history of a 14th century East Anglian nunnery founded in the 12th century by Brian de Retteville in memory of his wife who had once dishonoured and always despised him. The book should be easily available through all good booksellers. At Jarrold’s Book Department in Norwich it can bought for £1 off the rrp of £7.99 or at the full price as part of their 3 for 2 promotion. Warners poetry and many of her short stories are now in print or available ’on demand’ including Dorset Stories published last year by Black Dog Books of Norwich.
This is my first go on an internet message site! I read The Corner That Held Them when I was a sixth former over twenty years ago, a tatty hard back version from the school library. It was only when I read about the book in the paper that I remembered how difficult I found it at the time and how in a review for the school magazine I said something about being very frustrated about nothing really happening in the book.. Having just re-read it and with twenty years of extra life behind me I can see how true to life the book is. Life is mostly about day to day ordinariness even when extraordinary things are happening in the world around and gradually all the ordinariness plus the odd bit of excitement starts to mean something. I read somewhere that the book is like a tapestry where each stitch doesn’t appear to be important until you begin to see the picture slowly emerging and even at the end of the book the tapestry is still incomplete. I’ve started reading the letters between Sylvia Townshend Warner and Valentine Ackland and have been struck by how ordinary many of the details in the letters are. A fascinating evocation of the struggles of day to day life with the odd bit of excitement.
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