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Sylvia Townsend Warner
1893 - 1978 |
| SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER was born and brought up at Harrow
School where her father George was a housemaster and teacher of
history. A music student, she became interested in the music of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and spent ten years editing the
ten-volume compilation Tudor Church Music. In 1925 she published
her first book of verse, The Espalier. With the publication of the
novels, Lolly Willowes (1926), Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927) and The
True Heart (1928) she achieved immediate recognition. The short
stories she contributed to The New Yorker for over forty years
established her reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. In all
Sylvia Townsend Warner published seven novels, four volumes of
poetry, a volume of essays, and eight volumes of short stories.
Her biography of T. H. White appeared in 1967 and she also
translated Proust’s essays Contre Saint Beuve. A writer of great
scope and imaginative power each of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
novels is a new departure ranging from revolutionary Paris in 1848
in Summer Will Show, a 14th century Abbey in The Corner that Held
Them (1948) to the South Sea Islands in Mr Fortune’s Maggot.
Sylvia Townsend Warner lived for many years with her partner
Valentine Ackland in Dorset. She died on 1 May 1978, aged
eighty-four. |
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