author
Sylvia Townsend Warner
1893–1978
An English novelist, poet, and musicologist, she wrote with wit, independence, and a touch of the uncanny. Best known for Lolly Willowes, she also produced admired poetry, short fiction, and historical fiction across a long literary career.
1 Audiobook
Lolly Willowes : or, the loving huntsman
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
About the author
Born in Harrow on 6 December 1893, Sylvia Townsend Warner was educated at home and first built her reputation through music as well as literature. In the 1920s she helped edit the large-scale Tudor Church Music project for Oxford University Press, and soon began publishing poetry and fiction of her own.
Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), established her as a distinctive new voice, and she went on to write novels including Mr Fortune's Maggot, Summer Will Show, and The Corner That Held Them, along with many short stories and poems. Her work is often noted for its intelligence, dry humor, and interest in freedom, inner life, fantasy, and the pressures placed on women.
Warner spent much of her later life in Dorset and shared a long partnership with the poet Valentine Ackland. She died on 1 May 1978. Although she was never a conventionally famous writer, her books have continued to attract devoted readers and renewed critical attention.