Showing results by author "Sylvia Townsend Warner" in All Categories

Brought to you by Penguin. The nuns who enter a medieval Norfolk convent are told to renounce the world, but the world still finds ways to trouble them, whether it is through fire, floods, pestilence, a collapsing spire, jealous rivalries, a priest with a secret or a plague of caterpillars. As...

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific author of novels, short stories and poetry, who also wrote a biography of T. H. White, translated Proust and was an authority on Tudor church music. A sharp, insightful storyteller, she was one of the 20th Century's most acute observers of English mores, and her work is infused with subversive themes reflecting her feminist and Marxist views. This comprehensive anthology includes dramatisations of her two best-known novels.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the listener in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. 

Brought to you by Penguin. Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling...

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family - a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of 20th-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Laura Willowes, forced to move from her family home due to the death of her father, endures her role as Aunt Lolly in her new home with her brother, his wife and children in London. Though her life becomes overshadowed by family obligation and domestic tasks, after many years she decides to reclaim it for herself - however circumstances threaten to christen her Aunt Lolly once again. Published in 1926, this feminist novel presents a critique of the established roles and responsibilities of women, delivered in a deceptively light-hearted package. (Summary by Shannon Sullivan)

Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a café before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife. In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart's entanglements.

When Laura Willowes’s beloved father dies, she is absorbed in the household of her brother and his family. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces. For twenty years, Lolly is neither indulgent nor impulsive, until one day when she decides to move to a village in the Chilterns, much to her family’s chagrin.

After the death of her father, Laura Willowes moves in with her brother and his wife where she is burdened with her new role as Aunt Lolly. After living with them for years and realizing her own unhappiness she suddenly decides to move to Great Mop, a small unassuming village in the countryside. There she makes a deal with the devil, a loving guardian and watcher-over of dissatisfied souls, and becomes a witch as she continues to fight off the persona of Aunt Lolly as it attempts to reclaim her. - Summary by Sandy

The Ultimate Modern Classics Collection: Volume One is the first instalment in our classics collection focusing on the most important and iconic novels, stories, and poems of the 20th century. Featuring 22 essential modern classics from Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Hesse, Agatha Christie, Virigna Woolf, and many more, and read by a cast of incredible narrators including David Rintoul, Robert G. Slade, Karen Cass, Nathan Osgood, amongst others, this is an essential addition to your library.

In this captivating feminist novel, Laura Willowes finds herself uprooted from her childhood home following her fathers death. Now living in London with her brother, sister-in-law, and their children, she reluctantly embraces her role as Aunt Lolly. As the years pass, her existence becomes a blur of familial duties and domesticity, but a spark ignites within her, urging her to reclaim her identity. Yet, just as she begins to assert herself, the shadows of obligation loom large once more. Published in 1926, this insightful tale critiques the societal expectations placed on women, all wrapped in...

After the death of her father, Laura Willowes moves in with her brother and his wife, where she finds herself trapped in the role of Aunt Lolly. Years of unhappiness pass until she makes a bold decision to relocate to the quaint village of Great Mop. There, she encounters a mysterious guardian—a loving figure who watches over restless souls—and strikes a deal that transforms her into a witch. As she embraces her newfound identity, she fiercely battles against the suffocating persona of Aunt Lolly, determined to reclaim her true self. - Summary by Sandy