Sylvia
Townsend Warner, the daughter of George Townsend Warner, a Harrow
School history master, was
born in 1893. Educated at home she worked in a munitions
factory during the First World War.
Nancy
Cunard introduced Warner to Mary Valentine
Ackland and the two women lived together for the rest of their
lives. Warner's first novel, Lolly Willowes,
was published in 1926. This was followed by the novels Mr.
Fortune's Maggot (1927) and The
True Heart (1929).
Warner was the
co-editor of the 10-volume Tudor Church
Music (1923-29). Warner also wrote poetry and in 1933 published
Whether A Dove or Seagull with
Ackland. A regular contributor to New
Yorker, Warner's poetry was praised by Alfred
Edward Housman and
William
Butler Yeats
and Louis
Untermeyer
compared her to
Thomas
Hardy.
Warner
was a strong opponent of the British government's non-intervention
policy during the Spanish
Civil War.
In 1936 Warner and Ackland went to Barcelona
and worked
for the British medical unit supporting the Republican
Army.
The following year the two women went to Madrid
and
Valencia
as part
of the British delegation to the Second Congress of the International
Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture.
Other novels
by Warner include Summer Will Show
(1936), After the Death of Don Juan
(1938), The Corner That Held Them
(1948) and The Flint Anchor (1954).
During her career Warner published seven novels, ten volumes of short
stories, five volumes of poetry and a biography of T. H. White. Sylvia
Townsend Warner
died in 1978.
(1)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Countryman (October 1937)
It
is unusual for writers to hear such words as 'Here come the
Intellectuals' spoken by working-class people and common soldiers
in tones of kindliness and enthusiasm. And it was a new experience
to see a harvest being reaped with sickles, and trodden out upon threshing-floors.
This
harvest on the long plain east of Madrid is significant in many ways.
While the strange workings of Non-Intervention impede even foodstuffs
from reaching that part of Spain which is loyal to the government,
every ear of corn is important. I was told a story about this, while
we sat quenching our midday thirst in the inn of Utiel, sitting in
a large, bare, half-darkened room, while, silhouetted against the
blazing light of the open doorway, the children of the town came in,
at first shyly, then confidently, to walk exploringly around us, murmuring
to each other those words we had already learned not to
flinch at, 'These are the Intellectuals.' It was a writer who told
me the story, Jef Last. But he spoke as a soldier, for he has been
fighting since the outbreak of the Franco revolt. This year, he said,
the corn had ripened early. His regiment was holding a section of
the line which runs through cornfields. The men, very many of them
peasants, watched the corn with interest; presently, with passionate
concern. For it was ready to reap, and in these acres dominated by
war there was no
one to reap it. They watched the corn as patriots, too, knowing the
important of the harvest. They held a meeting, and decided that they
themselves would reap it. Sickles were got and the corn behind the
lines was reaped and stocked. But there was corn in front as well,
in no man's land. Crawling out on their bellies, under threat of fire
always and often under fire, working in the time allotted to them
for rest, they reaped the no man's land corn also. Between them and
the enemy was an array of neat stocks. But who was to carry it? Each
soldier is equipped with a blanket, and they carried the corn in their
blankets, carrying the treasure back behind the lines to where common
life began again, to where the mules trudged on the threshing-floor
and the barns could store the harvest.
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