Letters Of Sylvia Townsend Warner

S Warner

Juli 2013 · Random House

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Very early in her career Sylvia Townsend Warner won recognition of a discerning group of writers and readers on both sides of rare imagination and originality increased with each new publication. In addition to publishing some twenty books she wrote thousands of letters, mainly to close friends and acquaintances, and these quite naturally provide a record of almost fifty years of the writer’s life.

As the editor of the selection says, she had a connoisseur’s eye for the bogus and a hatred for assumptions of privilege – her heart was with the hunted, always, and her deep understanding of human behaviour makes the whole a remarkably compassionate volume. Her interests are wide-ranging, and we read of the pleasures of travel, Proust’s shortcomings as a literary critic, current politics, Rupert Brooke at the Café Royal, an eccentric moorhen, the Spanish Civil War.

Above all, apart from their intrinsic interest and literary quality, Miss Warner’s letters reveal the special brand of wit and humour that pervades every word she writes.

Autoren-Profil

Sylvia Townsend Warner, distinguished poet and novelist, received no formal education but, as her Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories (1981) reveals, she came from a highly cultured family background. She published her first book of poems in 1925, and with her novels, Lolly Willowes in 1926, and Mr Fortune’s Maggot in 1927, she gained immediate recognition as a writer. By the time of her death in 1978 she had published seven novels; several books of poems, including the volume Twelve Poems, written in the last years of her life; eight collections of witty and ironic stories (many of them first published in the New Yorker); and a biography of T. H. White, judged by the Guardian to have been one of the two most outstanding biographies published since the war.