Table of Contents: The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 21(1)

Issue information for The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 21(1).

Hamlet in England

An unpublished short story by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It fancifully elaborates the story of Acts 4 and 5 of Hamlet, starting on board the ship taking Hamlet to England after the killing of Polonius. The story begins before the Danish vessel’s encounter with a pirate ship and Hamlet’s capture by the pirates, and imagines the circumstances by which he returns to Denmark in the changed state of mind in which we meet him in Act 5.

Sylvia Townsend Warner and Peter Pears: Loss and Friendship

This article describes the friendship between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten in the 1970s. It draws on previously unpublished correspondence held at the Britten-Pears Archive and the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive. It describes the role that John Craske’s paintings played in establishing the connection between Warner and Pears, details some visits and covers Britten’s illness and death. The article also describes the concert in Warner’s honour planned by Pears and given in Aldeburgh in July 1977.

Footsteps on the Battlements

Writing in 1948, Sylvia Townsend Warner takes a sceptical look at recent trends in performances of Hamlet on stage and screen, and also at academic and psychoanalytic discussions of the play.

‘All across Europe it had come’: The Black Death and Fascism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s wartime novel The Corner that Held Them (1948), about a nunnery during the Black Death, reflects on female community and bonding in a period of male fascist violence. The novel explores the shift from pacifism to acceptance of the need for anti-fascist war which characterised Warner’s intellectual beliefs from the 1930s into wartime, probing the arts of peace in compositional practice. Such a dialectic of war and peace is considered in relation to what Maud Ellmann has described as the outward turn to collective choral consciousness in mid-century modernism. This article explores both the staging of fascism as plague and the feminist daring and limits that Warner saw as operative in female witnessing and withstanding of Nazi ideology and menace. It closely reads key scenes from the panorama of a novel (notably Alianor’s stillness as her husband is killed, Alicia’s plans to withstand the economic impact of the Black Death and the cure of Ralph’s plague symptoms) to register the satirical and allegorical substance of Warner’s rescripting of Woolfian notions of resistance to warmongering misogyny by a society of outsiders. The readings seek to consolidate a varied and multiple sense of the book as a Marxist historical novel that gives voice to the ruled. In doing so Warner analyses the Black Death as a moment in history that saw the emergence of early modern capitalism and labour relations out of the feudal system, even as the religious framework that had structured medieval Europe gave way to more secular beliefs in autonomy, self-determination, citizen and collective dreams, projects and affects. At the same time the plague as a political trope, rooted in anti-fascist rhetoric that turns Nazi anti-Semitic uses of the Black Death motif on their head, triggers readings that bring those historical scenes into allegorical relation with the ways in which the Second World War was experienced by marginalised female communities.

Stephen Tomlin in Chaldon Herring (1921–3)

This chapter from the new biography of Stephen Tomlin by Michael Bloch and Susan Fox details the years 1921–3, when Tomlin and Sylvia Townsend Warner knew each other best and saw one another most frequently.

The Unfinished Sequel to The Corner That Held Them (Part 2 of 2)

This is the second part of a two-part edited presentation of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s unfinished sequel to her 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them. The first part was published in the Sylvia Townsend Warner Journal 2020:1, pp. 8–38. Part 2 continues to describe the early stages of a pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem.