Sylvia townsend warner biography of michael
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Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893 in Harrow and died in Dorset in 1978. Educated at home she worked in a munitions factory during the First World War, moving on to become a versatile writer whose career spanned poems, short stories, novels, music reviews, a biography, translations of Proust and a guide to Somerset.
Her work as an expert musicologist and co-editor of Tudor Church Music (1922-29) kept her in London in the 1920s but she escaped for weekends and vacations to the Georgian family villa, Little Zeal, on the southern slopes of Dartmoor near South Brent, which her mother and father had built in 1914. One of her fellow editors at Tudor Church Music – and long-time lover – was Percy Buck, a married man twenty-two years her senior.
Warner first bought a house in Dorset in 1930 and lived in the village of Chaldon Herring. Here she met the young poet Valentine Ackland, with whom she would live until Ackland's death in 1969. The cou
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New Collected Poems (Fyfield Books) (Carcanet)
(Publ in Ambit 193, June 2008)
With discerning scholarship Claire Harman has edited, selected and annotated both the collected and uncollected work (1925-1980) of an overlooked lyrical and satirical voice. Her introduction, like her award-winning 1990 biography, reveals the life and diverse literary output of Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose prose fiction and verse attracted equal critical interest until she closed her publicised career as a poet after the notorious Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1934) This intertwining of verse (without titles or authorial names) by herself and her lover and fellow poet, Valentine Ackland, was blacklisted less for its movingly expressed (and deftly ignored) lesbian eroticism, than for questioning the mindset that ‘judges the poem by the poet rather than the poet by the poem’. A cue for us now, though we’d need to assess Warner’s novels, short stories, translations and biographic