Sylvia Townsend Warner

Based on Wikipedia: Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Witch Who Got Away

In 1926, a novel appeared in London bookshops with a premise that still startles: a middle-aged spinster, tired of being the family's unpaid caretaker, moves to a remote village and sells her soul to the Devil. Not out of desperation or wickedness, but for freedom. The book was Lolly Willowes, and its author, Sylvia Townsend Warner, had written something that would resonate with women readers for the next century.

Warner herself was no ordinary debut novelist. She was thirty-two, had been expelled from kindergarten for mimicking her teachers, had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War, and had spent years as a musicologist transcribing Tudor church music into modern notation. She would go on to live openly with the woman she loved for nearly four decades, join the Communist Party, serve in the Spanish Civil War, and produce a body of work that The New Yorker would publish for decades.

Her life reads like several different novels spliced together. Perhaps that's why she was so good at writing them.

A Very Particular Kind of Education

Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner was born on December 6, 1893, in Harrow on the Hill, a suburb of London famous for its elite boys' school. Her father, George Townsend Warner, was a house-master there—which meant he oversaw one of the residential houses where students lived during term. Harrow was, and remains, one of Britain's most prestigious "public schools." The term is confusing for American readers: in British usage, a "public school" is actually a private institution, typically expensive, typically old, typically producing future prime ministers and bishops. George Townsend Warner was so well-regarded as a history teacher that after his death, an award was renamed in his honor.

Young Sylvia never attended Harrow, of course. It was for boys only. After her expulsion from kindergarten—the mimicry incident—her father took over her education entirely. Home-schooling by a brilliant historian at one of England's great schools gave her an unusual foundation: rigorous but unconventional, steeped in the past but free from the social pressures of formal schooling.

She was musically gifted. Before the war that changed everything, she had planned to study in Vienna under Arnold Schoenberg, the composer who would revolutionize Western music by abandoning traditional tonality altogether. It's a tantalizing counterfactual: what if Warner had become a composer rather than a novelist? But August 1914 intervened, and Vienna became enemy territory.

Instead, she moved to London and worked in a munitions factory. The contrast is almost surreal—from planning to study avant-garde composition under one of history's most radical musicians to filling shells with explosives. But such were the disruptions of 1914.

Her father died in 1916, midway through the war. She was twenty-two. The loss affected her deeply, and it would echo through her work: absent fathers, daughters breaking free, women finding their own way without patriarchal guidance.

The Tudor Music Years

After the war, Warner found employment that suited her unusual talents. From 1917, she worked as one of the editors of Tudor Church Music, an ambitious scholarly project to publish ten volumes of Renaissance sacred music through Oxford University Press, funded by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust.

This was not glamorous work. It meant traveling to libraries and archives across Britain to examine original manuscripts—handwritten musical scores from the 1400s and 1500s, often faded, sometimes damaged, written in notation systems that modern musicians couldn't read without specialized training. Warner's job was to transcribe this ancient notation into modern form so that the music could actually be performed again.

Think about what this required: expertise in historical musical notation, the ability to interpret marks made by long-dead scribes, patience for tedious scholarly detective work, and enough musical understanding to catch errors and inconsistencies. The lead editor was Sir Richard Terry, who as Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral had pioneered the revival of this forgotten repertoire. Warner got the position through her lover and music teacher, Sir Percy Buck, who sat on the editorial committee.

Yes, lover. Warner's first significant romantic relationship was with a married man, a respected academic and musician. This was the 1910s and 1920s—such arrangements were not unusual, though they required discretion. What was unusual was what came next.

Warner contributed to the Oxford History of Music as well, writing a section on musical notation for the introductory volume published in 1929. By then, she had already become famous for something else entirely.

Enter the Devil

In 1923, Warner met a writer named Theodore Francis Powys—everyone called him T. F.—a novelist and short story writer who lived in rural Dorset. His writing influenced hers, and she encouraged his in return. The friendship mattered.

It was also at Powys's home that Warner met Valentine Ackland.

But first, the book. Lolly Willowes appeared in 1926, and it announced Warner's themes with startling clarity. The protagonist, Laura Willowes, has spent decades as the dutiful unmarried daughter, passed from one relative's household to another, expected to be grateful for her room and board, expected to help with children that aren't hers, expected to have no desires of her own.

She escapes to a remote village. She becomes a witch. She sells her soul to Satan, who appears to her as a friendly local man. The Devil in Warner's telling isn't interested in evil for its own sake—he's simply an alternative to the stifling respectability of Christian English society. He offers freedom. Laura takes it.

The novel was a success. It established Warner as a writer whose focus was, as one critic put it, on "subverting societal norms." She rejected Christianity in her fiction, championed female independence, questioned everything about how English society was organized. And she was just getting started.

Valentine

Valentine Ackland was a young poet when she met Warner at T. F. Powys's home. She used a masculine name—Valentine—and often dressed in masculine clothing. The two women fell in love.

They moved in together in 1930. In 1933, they published a joint collection of poems, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, without indicating which poet had written which poems. Readers and critics were meant to experience the verse as a unified work, a collaboration so close that individual authorship didn't matter.

The book was savaged. The critical and personal hostility it received effectively ended both women's public careers as poets. Warner continued to write poetry privately for the rest of her life, but her Collected Poems wouldn't appear until 1982, four years after her death. Ackland's Journey from Winter: Selected Poems wasn't published until 2008, nearly forty years after she died.

What killed the book? It's impossible to separate the artistic reception from the personal. Two women writing together, living together, their poems intermingled without attribution—it made visible something that English society preferred to keep invisible. The punishment was swift.

In 1937, Warner and Ackland settled permanently at a house called Riversdale, beside the River Frome in a village with the wonderful name of Frome Vauchurch, near Maiden Newton in Dorset. They initially rented it without planning to stay, but they bought it in 1946 and lived there for the rest of their lives together.

The relationship was not easy. Ackland was unfaithful—her affairs included one with a writer named Elizabeth Wade White that caused Warner real anguish. But they stayed together. When Ackland died in 1969, Warner lived on alone at Riversdale for another nine years. After Warner's death in 1978, her ashes were buried with Ackland's at St. Nicholas church in Chaldon Herring, Dorset.

They had been together for thirty-nine years.

The Novels of Revolution

Warner's fiction kept exploring the themes she'd announced in Lolly Willowes. Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927)—the title uses "maggot" in its old sense of a whim or obsession—follows a missionary to the Pacific Islands and has been described as a "satirical, anti-imperialist novel." The missionary's faith doesn't survive contact with the people he meant to convert. Once again, Christianity comes off badly.

Summer Will Show (1936) is more explicitly political. Its heroine, Sophia Willoughby, travels to Paris during the Revolution of 1848 and falls in love with a woman. Warner was writing about same-sex love in the 1930s, in mainstream fiction, and getting it published.

By then, she and Ackland had joined the Communist Party. This wasn't unusual for British intellectuals in the 1930s—the Great Depression had discredited capitalism, fascism was rising across Europe, and the Soviet Union had not yet revealed the full horror of Stalinism to the world. Spain became the crisis point.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, it seemed like a clear moral battle: a democratic republic against fascist generals backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Writers and artists from across Europe and America went to Spain to fight or to bear witness. Warner and Ackland went with the Red Cross as part of the international response.

In July 1937, Warner participated in the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, held in Valencia while the war raged. The congress brought together writers from around the world to oppose fascism. Warner was there.

The Republic fell in 1939. Warner and Ackland returned to England, their political hopes crushed but their commitment unbroken. Marxist ideals continued to appear in Warner's work.

A Convent, Centuries Ago

In 1948, Warner published what many consider her masterpiece: The Corner That Held Them. It's a novel about a medieval convent, and it does something unusual—it has no plot, not really. Instead, it follows the lives of the nuns over decades, watching the small dramas of communal religious life unfold without any single story taking center stage.

The title refers to the physical space the convent occupies, a corner of the English countryside where women live out their days in prayer and work and petty conflict and occasional transcendence. Warner was interested in women living apart from men, building their own society, making their own rules. The convent, even a medieval one bound by Catholic doctrine, offered a kind of freedom from marriage and motherhood that secular life rarely allowed.

The book appeared the same year as The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Both writers were asking what women's lives looked like when examined closely, without romantic illusion.

The New Yorker Years

Warner became one of The New Yorker's most prolific fiction contributors. Over the decades, she published story after story in the magazine, developing a reputation for elegant prose and sly wit. Her short story collections accumulated: A Moral Ending and Other Stories, The Salutation, More Joy in Heaven, The Cat's Cradle Book, A Garland of Straw, The Museum of Cheats, Winter in the Air, A Spirit Rises, A Stranger with a Bag, The Innocent and the Guilty.

She wrote anti-fascist articles for leftist publications like Time and Tide and Left Review. She translated Marcel Proust from French into English—specifically his essay collection Contre Sainte-Beuve (published in English as By Way of Sainte-Beuve). She wrote a biography of T. H. White, the author of The Once and Future King, after being given access to his papers following his death.

That biography caused controversy. The New York Times called it "a small masterpiece which may well be read long after the writings of its subject have been forgotten." But White's literary agent, David Higham, accused Warner of bias, suggesting that her own homosexuality had led her to overemphasize White's homosexual tendencies while ignoring evidence of heterosexual relationships. Warner had been given the address of one of White's female lovers, Higham claimed, but never contacted her.

The accusation is hard to evaluate at this distance. Biographers always select and interpret. Warner may have seen in White what she recognized in herself. Or she may have simply followed the evidence where it led.

Kingdoms of Elfin

Warner's final work was published in 1977, a year before her death. Kingdoms of Elfin collects interconnected short stories set in a supernatural realm. The fairies of Warner's imagination are not cute or whimsical—they're alien, amoral, operating by rules that have nothing to do with human morality.

She was eighty-three years old. She had been writing for over fifty years. And her last book was about magical creatures who exist parallel to our world, living by their own strange logic.

Many of the stories had appeared in The New Yorker over the preceding years. The magazine had published Warner's fairy tales alongside the fiction of John Updike and the reportage of A. J. Liebling. She belonged there.

After

Warner died on May 1, 1978, at eighty-four. She had never written an autobiography, but a book called Scenes of Childhood was compiled after her death from short reminiscences she had published in The New Yorker over the years. Her letters were published. Her diaries were published. Scholars began to assess her work.

In the 1970s, even before her death, Warner had become recognized as an important feminist and lesbian writer. Virago Press, the pioneering British publisher of women's writing, brought her novels back into print. New generations of readers discovered Lolly Willowes and recognized in Laura's escape from dutiful spinsterhood something that spoke to their own desires for freedom.

A society was founded in her honor: the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, established in Dorchester in 2000, publishing an annual journal through University College London Press.

In December 2025—just recently—a memorial was unveiled on a pedestrianized shopping street in Dorchester. The bronze statue depicts Warner sitting on a bench, as if waiting for someone to join her and talk. The artwork was organized by Visible Women UK, a charity that campaigns for greater representation of women in public art. Warner was chosen by public vote. The sculptor, Denise Dutton, had previously created the statue of Mary Anning—the pioneering paleontologist—in Lyme Regis.

It's a fitting tribute. Warner spent her life making women visible: witches who chose freedom over respectability, nuns building their own worlds, lesbians loving openly in the 1930s, herself living as she pleased with the woman she loved.

Why She Matters Now

Here is something that connects Warner to Caren Beilin's writing and to the contemporary feminist discussions happening on Substack and elsewhere: she understood that women's bodies are political territory. The spinster aunt who becomes a witch is reclaiming her body from family use. The nuns in their convent are living in female bodies apart from male control. The women who love women are refusing the compulsory heterosexuality that society demands.

Warner never preached. Her novels are sly, witty, beautifully written. The radicalism is in the premises, not the prose style. She simply assumed that women might want lives of their own, might love whom they pleased, might find Christianity a constraint rather than a comfort. And she wrote as if these assumptions were obvious, natural, unremarkable.

That's the most subversive move of all: to normalize what others insisted was deviant.

She was expelled from kindergarten for mimicry. She planned to study with Schoenberg. She edited Tudor church music. She worked in a munitions factory. She lived with a woman for nearly four decades. She went to Spain during the Civil War. She published in The New Yorker for years. She wrote about witches and fairies and medieval nuns and missionaries who lose their faith.

She contained multitudes. Her books still do.