Download or read book The Nature of the Moment written by Valentine Ackland and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1996-09 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Valentine Ackland written by Frances Bingham and published by Handheld Classics. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One November evening in 1925, two young women from London arrived at the village of Chaldon, in Dorset. They brought with them two suitcases, a gramophone, and a wooden boxful of records; the bare necessities. Both wore trousers and had Eton-cropped hair. The taller of the two, Mrs Turpin, had come to the country to recover from a recent operation to remove her hymen.' Mrs Turpin was Valentine Ackland, on the run from her recent disastrous marriage. She was soon to meet the love of her life, Sylvia Townsend Warner, already a celebrity for her dashing debut novel Lolly Willowes. They would live in Dorset together in a passionate relationship until Valentine's death in 1969. Valentine was a dedicated poet, deeply involved with Communism during the 1930s, and an environmentalist and peace campaigner. Recently released MI5 files show that she was blacklisted for confidential work during the Second World War, and remained under long-term surveillance. Despite her commitment to Sylvia, Valentine had many affairs with women who fell for her androgynous beauty and her masterful conduct of an amour. She also struggled with alcoholism, but the relationship with Sylvia survived all challenges.
Download or read book For Sylvia written by Valentine Ackland and published by Random House (UK). This book was released on 1989 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valentine Ackland, writer and poet, was for 40 years the closest companion of Sylvia Townsend Warner, for whom she wrote this autobiographical essay. It tells of her childhood, life in London in the 1920s, lesbian relationships, a hopeless marriage and her fight against alcoholism.
Download or read book Life Writing Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland written by Ailsa Granne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sylvia Townsend Warner has increasingly become recognized as a significant and distinctive talent amongst twentieth-century authors. This volume explores her remarkable relationship with Valentine Ackland - her partner for forty years - by closely examining their letters and diaries alongside a selection of their other texts, in particular their poetry. This analysis reveals the crucial role their writing played in establishing, maintaining, and defending their intimacy and describes the emergence of an alternative textual world upon which they became wholly reliant. Examining how Warner and Ackland exploited the distance between their lived life and their accounts of it, gives rise to many fascinating and untold stories. Furthermore, in investigating the fluidity of the boundaries between letters, diaries and fiction this book also provides a fresh perspective on these life-writing forms. Warner and Ackland's need to speak as women, writers and lovers, shaped their texts, so that they became not simply records of events, nor acts of communication, but complex documents in which love is won and lost, myths are created, and lives are changed, as will be the perspectives of those who read this book.
Download or read book This Narrow Place written by Wendy Mulford and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Whether a Dove Or a Seagull written by Sylvia Townsend Warner and published by . This book was released on 1933 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters Of Sylvia Townsend Warner written by S Warner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very early in her career Sylvia Townsend Warner won recognition of a discerning group of writers and readers on both sides of rare imagination and originality increased with each new publication. In addition to publishing some twenty books she wrote thousands of letters, mainly to close friends and acquaintances, and these quite naturally provide a record of almost fifty years of the writer’s life. As the editor of the selection says, she had a connoisseur’s eye for the bogus and a hatred for assumptions of privilege – her heart was with the hunted, always, and her deep understanding of human behaviour makes the whole a remarkably compassionate volume. Her interests are wide-ranging, and we read of the pleasures of travel, Proust’s shortcomings as a literary critic, current politics, Rupert Brooke at the Café Royal, an eccentric moorhen, the Spanish Civil War. Above all, apart from their intrinsic interest and literary quality, Miss Warner’s letters reveal the special brand of wit and humour that pervades every word she writes.
Download or read book The Passion Projects written by Melanie Micir and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history.
Download or read book Summer Will Show written by Sylvia Townsend Warner and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In revolutionary Paris, a disaffected Victorian wife becomes enraptured by her husband’s mistress—a “brilliantly entertaining” historical fiction novel that was “far ahead of its time” (Guardian). “One of the great under-read British novelists of the 20th century . . . my favorite of her novels.” —Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades. Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.
Download or read book Journey from Winter written by Valentine Ackland and published by Carcanet Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of gender studies and gay/lesbian literature will be delighted by these collected works of a dynamic poet whose popularity in the 1930s suffered due to her communist affiliations and notoriety as a lesbian. Complete with an invaluable introduction that provides context into her work, this collection offers sensitive accounts of lesbian love, the evils of war, the socialist struggle, the destruction of the natural world, and the beauty of the Dorset landscape. Spanning almost 50 years, these poems reflect the life experiences of a strong yet complicated woman in the mid-20th century with a voice that is powerfully felt and elegantly controlled.
Download or read book Lolly Willowes or the loving huntsman written by Sylvia Townsend Warner and published by Prabhat Prakashan. This book was released on 2024-08-12 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner is a captivating and unconventional novel that blends elements of fantasy, feminism, and dark comedy. The story follows Laura Willowes, a spinster who defies societal expectations by embracing a life of independence and adventure in the English countryside. After the death of her overbearing father and the departure of her family, Laura, or “Lolly,” relocates to a remote village where she finds solace and freedom. However, her quiet life takes a fantastical turn when she becomes involved with witchcraft and a mysterious pact with the devil. Warner’s novel is celebrated for its unique exploration of themes such as autonomy, the role of women in society, and the conflict between personal desires and societal norms. With its rich prose, sharp wit, and imaginative narrative, Lolly Willowes offers a profound and entertaining commentary on the constraints placed on women and the transformative power of embracing one’s true self. It’s a must-read for those interested in literary fiction with a touch of the supernatural and a deep, feminist perspective.
Download or read book The Corner That Held Them written by Sylvia Townsend Warner and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
Download or read book Threads written by Julia Blackburn and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 John Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of The Evacuation of Dunkirk. Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So - as with all her books - Julia Blackburn's account of his life is far from a conventional biography. Instead it is a quest which takes her in many strange directions - to fishermen's cottages in Sheringham, a grand hotel fallen on hard times in Great Yarmouth and to the isolated Watch House far out in the Blakeney estuary; to Cromer and the bizarre story of Einstein's stay there, guarded by dashing young women in jodhpurs with shotguns. Threads is a book about life and death and the strange country between the two where John Craske seemed to live. It is also about life after death, as Julia's beloved husband Herman, a vivid presence in the early pages of the book, dies before it is finished. In a gentle meditation on art and fame; on the nature of time and the fact of mortality; and illustrated with Craske's paintings and embroideries, Threads shows, yet again, that Julia Blackburn can conjure a magic that is spellbinding and utterly her own.
Download or read book Sylvia Townsend Warner written by Claire Harman and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years' Sarah Waters The poet Sylvia Townsend Warner rose to sudden fame with the publication of her classic feminist novel Lolly Willowes in 1926, but never became a conventional member of London literary life, pursuing instead a long writing career in her own individualistic manner. Cheerfully defying social norms of the day, Warner lived in an openly homosexual relationship with the poet Valentine Ackland for almost forty years. Together, they were committed members of the Communist party and travelled twice to Spain during the Civil War, but Warner paid for her outspokenness with years of neglect, and channelled much of her emotional and intellectual energy into letters, poems and heart-breaking diaries that remained unpublished during her lifetime. In this enthralling and enlightening biography, Claire Harman tells the story of Warner's remarkable life and restores her to her rightful place as one of Britain's most unique and brilliant writers. "As passionate and truthful, elegant and enchanting as its subject." George D Painter "Harman skilfully weaves Sylvia's stories and letters into the biography, and the brilliance of the samples on display constantly takes you aback... Outstanding" Sunday Times
Download or read book British Women and the Spanish Civil War written by Angela Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through oral and written narratives, this book examines the interaction between women and the war in Spain, their motivation, the distinctive form of their involvment and the effect of the war on their individual lives. These themes are related to wider issues, such as the nature of memory and the role of women within the public sphere. The extent to which women engaged with this cause surpasses by far other instances of female mobilization in peace-time Britain. Such a phenomenon therefore can offer lessons to those who would wish to encourage a greater degree of interest amongst women in political activities today.
Download or read book Dorset Stories written by Sylvia Townsend Warner and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writer Sylvia Townsend Warner spent the best years of her life in Dorset from the time she first moved to Chaldon Herring in 1927 to her death in 1978. Collected together for the first time 'Dorset Stories' contains a number of previously unpublished stories and many others long out of print.
Download or read book Kingdoms of Elfin written by Sylvia Townsend Warner and published by Handheld Classics. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sylvia Townsend Warner's final collection of short stories contains sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom.
