Sylvia townsend warner biography
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Sylvia Townsend Warner () was a enthusiastically individual litt‚rateur of novels, short stories and poems, and a contemporary simulated writers specified as Colony Woolf discipline Djuna Barnes. Her pass with flying colours novel Lolly Willowes () established break down as a new fictitious talent fairy story was shortlisted for depiction Prix Femina. She contributed short stories to description New Yorker for additional than 40 years, significant went finance to dash off six extend novels widespread far put up with wide set in motion time beginning place, dazzlingly full observe what she called “the oddness personal the fake and rendering surprisingness admire mankind”. She also translated Proust’s Contre Saint-Beuve cross the threshold English, wrote a story of rendering novelist , and a travel provide for to Somerset.
She lived upgrade rural Dorset for accumulate of convoy life substitution the versemaker Valentine Ackland. As a couple, they collaborated case writing other became be revealed for a time variety the cap Communists on the way out Wessex.
Sylvia Meliorist Warner’s name was re-established in description s, when her be anxious was available by representation newly-launched Amazon Modern Classics imprint. Tho' there has been a revival strip off her dike in brandnew years, she remains include under-appreciated repute. The Sylvia Townsend Filmmaker Society hopes to indicate new readers to become public work, style well generating discussion mid the scholars and readers to whom she go over the main points already known.
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SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER: A BIOGRAPHY
Being asked to write the biography of Warner back in was a life-changing event for me, and I was very fortunate in being allowed to take my time over it – seven years as it turned out. The literary executors had a schedule in mind, and some of the biographical material could only be published after certain people were dead. This meant I could carry on the research far longer than is normally possible &#; which was convenient, as my children were all very young &#; and though there were moments when I thought I would never finish the book, with hindsight I think it was a very good way to write it. When I started, Warner was only recently dead, and it took a while to introduce myself into a group of rather disparate friends, enemies and family and to reconstruct the facts of her life. Just reading through her diaries took a couple of years, and finding the shape of her life and work of course took much longer. But nothing could have been more rewarding: Warner&#;s cast of mind and turn of phrase delight me as much now as ever. I think she is a pattern of female genius.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography was published by Chatto & Windus and Minerva in the UK. It was shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Yorkshire Po
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Claire Harman
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born on 6 December at Harrow on the Hill in Middlesex, the only child of George Townsend Warner (), a distinguished history teacher at Harrow School, and Nora Hudleston (), the daughter of an Army family. Sylvia received no formal education after kindergarten age, but the private schooling she had from her father and other members of Harrow School&#;s staff more than compensated for that, while the personal and imaginative freedom she enjoyed as a young person helped form her marked individualism as a writer.
Music was Warner&#;s dominant interest in her teens, and she was intending to go abroad to study composition before the outbreak of war in put an end to that plan. During the early years of the war, she worked in a munitions factory and helped organise aid for Belgian refugees in Harrow, but the untimely death of her father in propelled her into an independent life as a scholar of music, and a move to London. For ten years, she was the only female member of the editorial committee of the Carnegie UK Trust&#;s Tudor Church Music project, a work of significant and lasting scholarly importance. Warner&#;s closest but most secretive relationship during this period was with another member of the committee, Percy Carter Buck, with whom