Selected Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner by Sylvia Townsend Warner
"Selected Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner" is a curated collection of forty-five short stories by the British author Sylvia Townsend Warner, spanning her prolific career from 1932 to 1977. This anthology reflects a thematic arrangement, showcasing Warner's exploration of human relationships, particularly romantic dynamics, as seen in her celebrated story "A Love Match," which received the Katherine Mansfield Menton Prize. The volume includes a diverse array of narratives, from stories featuring artists and neglected elderly women to those set against the backdrop of significant historical events like World War II and the Spanish Civil War. Additionally, it offers glimpses into Warner's upper-middle-class Edwardian childhood and her later fantastical works, which satirize societal norms. Although Warner maintained a loyal readership, her influence on literature was limited, as she focused more on character-driven storytelling than on advocating for social change. The collection serves as a testament to her unique voice and perspective within the literary landscape, appealing to readers interested in nuanced character studies and thematic depth.
Selected Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner by Sylvia Townsend Warner
First published: 1988
Type of work: Short stories
Form and Content
This selection by Sylvia Townsend Warner’s literary executors of forty-five of her short stories is taken from a period of forty-five years of her work, from 1932 to 1977. It represents only a small fraction of Warner’s output of short stories, which runs to fifteen volumes. At least one story is included from each of her volumes, starting with The Salutation (1932) and concluding with the posthumously published One Thing Leading to Another (1984).
According to William Maxwell—who was Warner’s editor at the The New Yorker, where many of her stories were first published—and Susanna Pinney, who jointly edited this selection, the stories are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Pride of place is given to Warner’s finest story, “A Love Match,” which was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Prize in 1968. This story and the five that follow (“Winter in the Air,” “Idenborough,” “The Foregone Conclusion,” “An Act of Reparation,” and “Lay a Garland on My Hearse”) all deal, in very different ways, with romantic relationships between men and women.
Thematic groupings are apparent in many of the remaining stories, which are notable for their diversity. There is a group of four stories (“Absolom, My Son,” “Boors Carousing,” “On Living for Others,” and “Plutarco Roo”) that have artists, composers, and writers as their protagonists. “Shadwell” and “Property of a Lady” both feature old women who have been neglected and forgotten in some way; the eccentric Finch family, featuring the hilarious Mrs. Finch (“As a conversationalist Mrs. Finch was considered hard to follow. Not that she was obscure: she was clear as the cuckoo; but like the cuckoo it was hard to follow her, for one could never be sure into what tree she had flown”), appears in two stories.
Although most of the stories are set in England, two exceptions are “The Apprentice,” which is set in Poland during the Nazi Occupation, and “A Red Carnation,” which is set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. These are the only two stories that might properly be called political, although two adjacent stories (“The Level-Crossing” and “A Speaker from London”) are also set in World War II and deal with close relationships between people which are disrupted by war.
Three stories are included from Scenes of Childhood (1981), a collection of sketches published posthumously describing Warner’s upper-middle-class Edwardian upbringing. In these stories, she introduces an assortment of odd characters ranging from her parents to great aunts, nannies, and retired majors. “I can always appease my craving for the improbable,” she wrote, “by recording with perfect truth my own childhood.” The volume concludes with a selection of seven stories from Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), a collection of fantasies about fairy kingdoms which were written in the last phase of Warner’s creative life. Some reviewers believed that these stories were among her finest work, but others saw them as a trivial indulgence on Warner’s part. The fairy kingdoms she describes are not mythical or otherworldly; they closely parallel human institutions and present Warner with many opportunities for satire on religious superstitions and social snobbery of all kinds.
Context
Like her own character Matthew Bateman, the writer in “Absolom, My Son,” Warner was well known without ever being popular, despite the small and loyal following that she developed as a result of her New Yorker stories. Her influence, whether as novelist, poet, or short-story writer, has therefore been negligible, but it is doubtful whether this would have distressed her. She was not in her work a crusader for causes, and her comments about the nineteenth century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell might serve equally well to describe her own work: “She attacked no abuses, she preached no remedies, she supplied no answers, she barely questioned. She presented her characters and told their story.”
On one occasion, however, Warner did comment on the place of women writers in society. That was in 1959, when she gave a Royal Society of Arts lecture on “Women as Writers.” In that address, Warner made some tart observations about the alarm with which a woman writer is regarded in a patriarchal society, and she illustrated her comments with a number of historical examples that have since become a standard part of feminist arguments. Warner thought that to succeed as writers women must be “obstinate and sly,” but she also remarked that it was easier for a woman to attain what she regarded as the writer’s greatest virtue, self-effacement, in the sense that the reader does not feel the presence of the writer at all—a comment that does not apply to her own stories.
Bibliography
Harmon, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. A carefully researched, full-length biography that makes use of many unpublished sources, including Warner’s diaries, which extended over a period of fifty years. Includes a complete bibliography of works by Warner.
Maxwell, William, ed. Letters: Sylvia Townsend Warner. London: Chatto & Windus, 1982. Includes hundreds of letters, covering the period from 1921 to 1978, many of them exhibiting the same literary qualities that illuminate Warner’s stories. Warner offers a number of comments on her work, but unfortunately there is no subject index with which to locate them, although there is an index of recipients.
Mulford, Wendy. This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters, and Politics, 1930-1951. London: Pandora Press, 1988. Focuses on the middle years of Warner’s relationship with her lifelong friend Valentine Ackland, the period when they were most politically active. The emphasis is on Warner, the more successful writer, and on her novels rather than her poems or short stories.