This Christmas, bask in these 'diminutive masterpieces' (Guardian) by the English genius behind Lolly Willowes.\n"One of our finest writers." — Neil Gaiman\n"One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years. " — Sarah Waters\n"Diminutive masterpieces ... Hand yourself over to be enchanted." — Guardian\n"Extraordinary, lucid wildness." — Helen MacDonald\nDecades 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.\nIn 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.\nWitty 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.

Winter in the Air

Literature & Fiction

Townsend Warner, Sylvia

Genre Fiction

Faber&Faber

A satirical feminist classic about a woman who leaves her stifling place in her brother's London home for the wilds of the English countryside, where she meets and makes a deal with the devil himself. Laura "Lolly" Willowes is an unmarried, middle-aged woman in early twentieth century London--a spinster who for the past twenty years has lived with, and in service of, her brother's overbearing family. With her brother's children now grown and out of the house, Lolly shocks her family by making a choice for herself: to move, alone, to the country. Once she arrives, Lolly carves out a life for herself in this lush and wild land, finding independence and a peace that she has never before experienced. Unfortunately, the family can't quite let go of Lolly, and her nephew shows up unannounced to move in to her country home. So long ruled by her family's expectations, Lolly makes a rash decision to solve her problems. With a subversive wit, Sylvia Townsend Warner's feminist classic poses the question--what would a woman do to ensure her freedom? The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Lolly Willowes: Or, The Loving Huntsman (Modern Library Torchbearers)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Modern Library

Kingdoms of Elfin

Short Stories & Anthologies

Chatto and Windus

A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

The Corner That Held Them (New York Review Books Classics)

British & Irish

NYRB Classics

In memory of the wife who had once dishonored and always despised him, Brian de Retteville founded a 12th-century convent in Norfolk. Two centuries later, the Benedictine community is well established there and, as befits a convent whose origin had such ironic beginnings, the inhabitants are prey to the ambitions, squabbles, jealousies, and pleasures of less spiritual environments. An outbreak of the Black Death, the collapse of the convent spire, the Bishop's visitation, and a nun's disappearance are interwoven with the everyday life of the nuns, novices, and prioresses in this marvelous imagined history of a 14th-century nunnery.

The Corner That Held Them (VMC)

Literary

Virago

Both stimulating and engaging, these poems display an astonishing capacity for wit, rich observations, and the cadences of poetic language. Documenting the life of Sylvia Townsend Warner, these poems emphasize her gift for music while exploring life, communist sympathies, and above all, the anguish and liberation of her great love affair with fellow poet Valentine Ackland.

Collected Poems: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Poetry

Carcanet Press Ltd.

Lolly Willowes

Siruela

Contemporary

Editorial Minuscula, S.L.U.

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Books by Townsend Warner, Sylvia