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“... Before she was born, Sylvia TownsendWarner was called Andrew. When she was seven, her mother took against her for failing to be pretty and failing to be male; by the time she was 17 she was known to the boys of Harrow, where her father was a master, as ‘the cleverest fellow we had ...”

“... Sylvia TownsendWarner expected her correspondence to be published, indeed she sensibly provided for it. ‘I love reading Letters myself,’ she told William Maxwell, her literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to school ...”

“... Sylvia TownsendWarner died in 1978, aged 84. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926, and none of her later works quite matched its success. In her later years she was probably better known to most people as a name that appeared under rather than above story after story in the New Yorker; that journal published about fifty over a period of some forty years ...”

“... On 2​ January 1931, Valentine Ackland sent her new lover, Sylvia TownsendWarner, a book about bisexuality. ‘After reading it carefully,’ she reported with evident relief, ‘I discover that you and I are admirably suited to each other.’ Warner was quick to imagine bisexuality as a kind of physiological oscillation ...”

“... Auk, Gilbert White, sea fishing, the Elephant Man, Edwardian Sheringham, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia TownsendWarner, embroidery technique, Edward Meyerstein, Walt Disney, the Norfolk Giant, the pituitary gland, diabetes, MI5, and Einstein, who stayed at a (not very) ‘secret location’ on Roughton Heath, near ...”

“... a lively, colourful selection, entirely welcome, except for one rather trivial poem about TV. Sylvia TownsendWarner was a novelist by profession and a poet at times, so she thought her poems the best of her. They are very fine, especially those which come in forms and manners which Hardy did most to establish and ...”

“... Beaton’s portraits of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thanks to darkroom dodging and burning, Sylvia TownsendWarner seems to glow with a pure white flame in a photograph from 1930; the Tate catalogue tells us the backdrop is satin, but it looks like Cellophane, which more than any other material meant modernity in ...”

“... writers (Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Mew, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Nancy Cunard, Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia TownsendWarner) allowed the old Victorian spinster a few escape-routes: killing off the controlling father who kept her at home (Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’); investing her with ...”

“... closer to it are the slightly spooky depths of rural England evoked by novelists like T.F. Powys, Sylvia TownsendWarner and David ...”

“... of Mary Butts, the Marxist version of village life offered by lesbians Valentine Ackland and Sylvia TownsendWarner, the Luddite organicism of Rolf Gardiner and the yeoman-patriotic creed of Sir Arthur Bryant (both the latter having shady pro-Nazi backgrounds). These idealists were all anti-MoD in a general ...”

“... certainly not his zeal for Communism, which was sincere enough in terms of the spirit of the age (Sylvia TownsendWarner was an equally incongruous convert) but which offered to Hamilton’s inner creativity nothing in the way of an alternative world. In his time he was a genuine odd man out, rather in the sense in ...”

“... Cath telegraphs her values to the reader through her favourite writers, who include Muriel Spark, Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Ivy Compton-Burnett: ‘they assumed intelligence – emotional as well as intellectual – on the part of the reader.’ Jennings’s style shares these writers’ brevity, directness and ...”

“... under the same title in 1971, and there are English translations of both works: of the first by Sylvia TownsendWarner in 1958, of the second by John Sturrock in 1988. The English titles rather elegantly contradict one another. Sturrock’s is literal and exact: Against Sainte-Beuve. ...”

“... London outlets, while New York still has a few, which sometimes accept British stories, as with Sylvia TownsendWarner and also, of course, Pritchett. There are many annual prizes for stories. Moreover the form fits better than the novel into the pattern of the creative writing courses that are taught all over the ...”

“... watches a soldier’s lips regain colour as her blood is piped directly from her veins into his. Sylvia TownsendWarner visits the public letter-writers’ booths, ‘where men and women whose faces bear the unmistakable imprint of intellect and thought wait in a queue to dictate the letters they are not able to write ...”