With the Hunted

Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most remarkable writers of the last century and yet, despite the success of her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926), she was largely ignored during her lifetime. With seven novels, four volumes of poetry, 150 short stories for the New Yorker and a biography of T.H. White to her name this neglect is odd but according to her biographer Claire Harman 'Being a woman and a lesbian and a Communist certainly didn't endear Warner to the establishment or to the literary canon-mongers ...' Warner received no formal instruction; 'I wasn't educated, I was very lucky', but her father was a master at Harrow and, having been taught music, she joined the Tudor Church Music Project in 1917. On a trip to the Essex Marshes in 1922 she discovered 'it was possible to write poetry' and, on meeting the reclusive writer T.F. Powy, chose relative obscurity in Dorset with the poet Ackland where she remained, latterly at Frome Vauchurch, until her death in 1978. From the New York Herald Tribune in 1929 to the Spectator in the late 1960s Warner became a distinguished literary critic. She joined the Communist Party and traveled with Ackland to Barcelona in 1936 and it is clear from her essays on female revolutionaries, dispatches from the Spanish Civil War and articles on rural deprivation that 'her heart was with the hunted, always'. These fugitive 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. The sense of place, so important to her fiction, is evident here 'with a wit as tangy as quince' in extracts from Somerset and in her pieces on social etiquette. Notable among a number of unpublished articles are 'A Class Distinction' and 'An Edinburgh Childhood' together with Warner's thoughts on the historical novel, women as writers and reflections on her own life in literature. This selection, delightful and revealing by turn, together with the letters, diaries and poems published since her death, establishes Warner alongside Virginia Woolf as one of the 20th century's most original writers. Book jacket.