Claire Harman on Sylvia Townsend Warner
This was a woman who corresponded with James Jeans about atomic theory, who was an expert on medieval musical notation and Tudor church music, who was going to study composition with Schoenberg until the First World War prevented it, and who was equally at home writing about the food in dolls’ houses, the United Nations or the sexual preferences of Edward Lear. “I wasn’t educated”, she said in 1977, “I was very lucky.” And she had, as John Updike once remarked, “the spiritual digestion of a goat.”
—published in the Times Literary Supplement, October 5, 2012
(Couldn’t find a good jpg of the TLS cover with Neale Osborne’s caricature of STW on the cover, so had to make do with a camera-phone pic.)
