A Born Diarist: Sylvia Townsend Warner

There are some diaries or collected letters I read over and over again, rereading with the pleasure one gets from hearing a friend’s voice. I first bought a copy of The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and introduced by Claire Harman in the Virago edition, in 1995. Each year I pick them up and read a few pages, or reread the entire life in diary form again.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born the daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed musicologist who had a long affair with her music teacher, older and married, and achieved fame in her early 30s by writing Lolly Willowes, the story of a spinster who retires to a quiet Englsih country village and, along with her neighbours, falls under the care and protection of the Devil, becoming a witch with a wise cat familiar and a new understanding of rural ways.

The book is charming and wicked, altogether uncontroversial. Townsend Warner was able to pull off the same hat trick that Virginia Woolf achieved with Orlando, avoiding the calumny and disgrace incurred by Radclyffe Hall with her Well of Loneliness. Like Lolly, Sylvia went off to live in Dorset with her literary friends the Powys family and fell in love with the lesbian poet Valentine Ackland with whom she co-published, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and joined the Communist Party. Her life with Valentine in the provinces is the basis of the diaries, deeply domestic and contented, full of daily insights and details of gardening, cats, fiction, the love of music — never a dull moment. John Updike commented that Townsend Warner had ‘the spiritual digestion of a goat’ and her passion for ideas, her eager curiosity and common sense, that rapid mind enjoying itself at every turn, makes her someone you wish you could have known as a correspondent.

Her letters to William Maxwell, An Element of Lavishness, is another collection to keep at hand. Her work is undergoing a revival, slow but certain — and I hope to be able to replace my battered copies of The Corner That held Them and Mr Fortune’s Maggot one of these days.

Entry September 9, 1929, Kensington Gardens

‘It was very hot and clear. I sat down under the plane trees where Teague had refused to vist the Albert Memorial; and suddenly I saw their trunks and branches all mottled and serpentine where they had cast away the works of darkness. … It was a moment for ever. Spring cannot bring me the same ravishment. Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.’