Sylvia Townsend Warner

English · 1893 to 1978

Born on December 6, 1893, in Harrow, England, Sylvia Townsend Warner was the only child of George Townsend Warner, a celebrated history master at Harrow School, who taught her at home after her presence reportedly unsettled a kindergarten. Music came first. She trained as a musicologist and spent more than a decade as one of the four editors of the ten-volume Tudor Church Music, work that gave her the precise ear that later distinguished her prose. A chance discovery of cheap paper in a stationer's window, she liked to say, turned her toward verse, and her first collection, The Espalier (1925), drew the attention of the publisher Chatto and Windus. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), about a spinster who escapes her family by becoming a witch, was an immediate success and the inaugural selection of the Book of the Month Club in America. Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927) and Summer Will Show (1936) followed, the latter set during the 1848 revolution in Paris. In 1930 she met the poet Valentine Ackland, and they lived together in Dorset for nearly forty years, joining the Communist Party in 1935 and traveling to Spain during the Civil War. Warner produced seven novels, the historical chronicle The Corner That Held Them (1948) among them, more than a hundred and forty stories for The New Yorker, poetry, a biography of T. H. White, and translations from Proust. Her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), returned her to the supernatural. She died on May 1, 1978, at her home in Maiden Newton, Dorset, at the age of eighty-four, having outlived Ackland by nearly nine years.