Sylvia Townsend Warner


Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English musicologist, novelist and poet, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, and After the Death of Don Juan.

Life

Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanor "Nora" Mary. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize following his death in 1916. As a child, Townsend Warner was home-schooled by her father after being kicked out of kindergarten for mimicking the teachers. She was musically inclined, and, before World War I, planned to study in Vienna under Schoenberg. She enjoyed a seemingly idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death. She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I.
In 1923, she met T. F. Powys, whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. The two became friends, and her debut novel, Lolly Willowes, was published shortly after in 1926. From her first work, it was clear that Warner's focus was on subverting societal norms; she would later heavily use the themes of rejecting the Church, a need for female empowerment, and independence in her works. It was at Powys' home that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet; the two women fell in love, moving in together in 1930 and eventually settling at Frome Vauchurch, Dorset, in 1937. Her relationship with Ackland inspired much of Warner's works, including a published collaboration of poems, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, in 1933. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party, and Marxist ideals found their way into Warner's works. Warner participated in the II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, held in Valencia between July 4 and 17, 1937, while serving in the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War. After the war, Warner and Ackland permanently returned to England, living together until Ackland's death in 1969. After Warner's death in 1978, her ashes were buried with Ackland's at St Nicholas, Chaldon Herring, Dorset.

Work

Early in her career Warner researched 15th and 16th century music. From 1917 she was in regular employment as one of the editors of Tudor Church Music, ten volumes published by Oxford University Press in the 1920s with the support of the Carnegie UK Trust. The lead editor was initially Sir Richard Terry, who as the Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral, had been a pioneer in the revival of Tudor vocal repertoire. Warner obtained the work as the protegee of her lover and music teacher Sir Percy Buck, who was on the editorial committee.
Warner was involved in travelling to study source material and in transcribing the music into modern musical notation for publication. Warner wrote a section on musical notation for the Oxford History of Music.
Her first published book was the 1925 poetry collection The Espalier, which was praised by A E Housman and Arthur Quiller-Couch. She was encouraged to write fiction by David Garnett. Warner's novels included Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune's Maggot, Summer Will Show, and The Corner That Held Them. Recurring themes are evident in a number of her works. These include a rejection of Christianity ; the position of women in patriarchal societies ; ambiguous sexuality, or bisexuality ; and lyrical descriptions of landscape. Mr Fortune's Maggot, about a missionary in the Pacific Islands, has been described as a "satirical, anti-imperialist novel". In Summer Will Show, the heroine, Sophia Willoughby, travels to Paris during the 1848 Revolution and falls in love with a woman. The Corner That Held Them focuses on the lives of a community of nuns in a medieval convent.
Warner's short stories include the collections A Moral Ending and Other Stories, The Salutation, More Joy in Heaven, The Cat's Cradle Book, A Garland of Straw, The Museum of Cheats. Winter in the Air, A Spirit Rises, A Stranger with a Bag, The Innocent and the Guilty, and One Thing Leading to Another. Her final work was a series of linked short stories set in the supernatural Kingdoms of Elfin. Many of these stories were published in The New Yorker. In addition to fiction, Warner wrote anti-fascist articles for such leftist publications as Time and Tide and Left Review.
After the death of the novelist T. H. White, Warner was given access to his papers. She published a biography which The New York Times declared "a small masterpiece which may well be read long after the writings of its subject have been forgotten." White's long-time friend and literary agent, David Higham, however, questioned Warner's work, suggesting a bias in her approach due to her own homosexuality: he gave Warner the address of one of White's lovers "so that she could get in touch with someone so important in Tim's story. But she never, the girl told me, took that step. So she was able to present Tim in such a light that a reviewer could call him a raging homosexual. Perhaps a heterosexual affair would have made her blush."
Warner produced several books of poetry, including Opus 7, a book-length pastoral poem about an elderly female flower-seller. The critical and personal hostility that greeted the jointly authored Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933 effectively put an end to the public poetic careers of both Warner and Ackland. It was only with the posthumous publication of Warner's Collected Poems in 1982 that the extent and significance of her poetry became evident, with poems ranging in date from 1914 through to 1978. Ackland's selected poems, Journey from Winter, were not published until 2008.
Although Warner never wrote an autobiography, Scenes of Childhood was compiled after her death on 1 May 1978 at age 84, based on short reminiscences published over the years in the New Yorker. She also translated Contre Sainte-Beuve by Marcel Proust from the original French into English. In the 1970s, she became known as a significant writer of feminist or lesbian sentiment, and her novels were among the earlier ones to be revived by Virago Press. Selected letters of Warner and Valentine Ackland have been published twice: Wendy Mulford edited a collection titled This Narrow Place in 1988, and ten years later Susanna Pinney published another selection, I’ll Stand by You.

Musicology

see also: