Sylvia Townsend Warner
The author of “Lolly Willowes” lived for almost forty years with the poet Valentine Ackland – and is buried with her.
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Harrow, the only child of a history master at Harrow School, who taught her at home after she was expelled from kindergarten for mimicking the teachers. She was a gifted musician and hoped to study with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna. Instead, from 1917, she spent ten years as one of the editors of “Tudor Church Music”, a major edition of 15th- and 16th-century English church music.
Her first novel, “Lolly Willowes” (1926), about a spinster who escapes her family to become a witch, was a success on both sides of the Atlantic. “Mr Fortune’s Maggot” (1927), “Summer Will Show” (1936) and “The Corner That Held Them” (1948) followed. Her works questioned the church and patriarchy and often featured ambiguous or bisexual desire. She also wrote poetry and many short stories for “The New Yorker”, and her last book, “Kingdoms of Elfin” (1977), was a collection of tales about fairies.
In 1930 she fell in love with the young poet Valentine Ackland. The two women lived together until Ackland’s death in 1969, from 1937 in a house by the River Frome in Dorset. Their relationship was often stormy, but it inspired much of Warner’s work; together they published a volume of love poems, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” (1933). Alarmed by fascism, both joined the Communist Party and went to Spain during the civil war.
Warner died in 1978, aged 84. Her ashes were buried with Ackland’s in the churchyard of Chaldon Herring in Dorset.