Sylvia Townsend Warner's tale of a Victorian woman's love for her husband's mistress is an extraordinary re-imagining of historical fiction
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) grew up in rural Devonshire before moving to London and writing her debut novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). With her partner Valentine Ackland, she was active in the Communist Party and served in the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War. Her novels include Mr Fortune's Maggot, The True Heart, Summer Will Show, After the Death of Don Juan, The Corner That Held Them and The Flint Anchor.
Sylvia Townsend Warner has to be one of the great under-read
British novelists of the twentieth century. This, my favourite of
her novels, has a disaffected Victorian wife falling for her
husband's charismatic mistress, and discovering revolutionary
politics along the way
*Sarah Waters*
It's a wildly leftist novel of love, war and death; Townsend Warner
chucks the lot into her simmering story, but it remains skilfully
crafted. Brilliantly entertaining and far ahead of its time
*Guardian*
With insight, malice, exquisiteness; in its wit, its instinct for
style, its drawing-room urbanities, it will suggest at one time or
another the work of a Rebecca West, a Virginia Woolf, an Elinor
Wylie
*The New York Times*
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