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This Christmas, ‘hand yourself over to be enchanted’ (Guardian) by the English genius behind witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes.
Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a café before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend’s kitchen knife.
In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart’s entanglements, from marriages and affairs to widowhood; and a champion of outsiders, whether single women, the elderly or wartime refugees.
Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a poet, novelist, journalist and musicologist. She grew up in Devonshire and was home-schooled for her rebellious behaviour. After World War II disrupted her musical studies, she moved to London to work in a munitions factory. With her partner Valentine Ackland, whom she lived with from 1930 until her death, Warner was active in the Communist…
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