‘My Usual Despicable Hold on Life’: The View from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries (The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2021)
<p class="first" id="d4630408e75"> This lecture draws on published and unpublished material from the 38 notebooks of different sizes, shapes and states of repair archived in the Dorset History Centre to argue that the richly informative d...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
UCL Press
2022-05-01
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| Series: | The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society |
| Online Access: | https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.stw.2021.10 |
| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d4630408e75">
This lecture draws on published and unpublished material from the 38 notebooks of
different sizes, shapes and states of repair archived in the Dorset History Centre
to argue that the richly informative diary Sylvia Townsend Warner began to keep in
1927 provides a vital resource for a fuller understanding of the fiction as well as
of the life. In particular I aim to demonstrate that melancholy constitutes a defining
preoccupation in both. I establish contexts for this preoccupation in Warner’s erudition
and in the work of Theodore and Llewellyn Powys, while also proposing some instructive
broader parallels with the contemporary writings of Walter Benjamin. Both, for example,
took a strong interest in the radical Bohemian culture which flourished in Paris before
and during the 1848 revolutions:
<i>Summer Will Show</i> (1936), set in that place at that time, is my main literary text. Other expressions
of melancholy examined include diary entries concerning two of the cats in Warner’s
life and a hitherto unpublished poem provoked by the revival of Valentine Ackland’s
affair with Elizabeth Wade White in the summer of 1949.
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| ISSN: | 1475-1674 2398-0605 |