Happy Birthday Sylvia Townsend Warner
Today in 1893 Sylvia Townsend Warner was born. We are proud to put back into print three of Townsend Warner’s novels: Lolly Willowes, Summer Will Show, and this past August, Mr. Fortune (an edition that combines both the novel Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and the follow-up novella The Salutation). We wanted to share the first paragraph of Adam Mars-Jones’s introduction to Mr. Fortune:
Comparison of writers with barnyard animals aren’t ordinarily complimentary, but there’s no mistaking the admiration in John Updike’s tone when he described Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) as having ‘the spiritual digestion of a goat.’ Elsewhere he has saluted the ‘more than half a century of brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production’ which somehow ‘never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of reputation that she deserved.’
