Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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F. Powys whose writing influenced h Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston.

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies. The painting gestures towards social progression – emancipated women moving freely over the landscape – and yet it also reveals much about the ‘right’ ways in which to encounter landscape. From her first work, it was clear that Warner's focus was on subverting societal norms; she would later heavily use the themes of rejecting the Church, a need for female empowerment, and independence in her works.

Inherited furniture has given way to the objects of the cottage – lamp, dinner plates, and supper table -which meet her eye ‘with self-possession’ (LW, 140). She published a biography which The New York Times declared "a small masterpiece which may well be read long after the writings of its subject have been forgotten.

Her relationship with Ackland inspired many of Warner's works, and the couple collaborated on a collection of poems, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, published in 1933. Rambling became a focus point for the promotion of appropriate landscape behaviours, with pamphlets warning against littering, the picking of wild flowers and damage to footpaths. Warner’s story also borrows from a tradition of short fables meant to share a moral lesson, connecting her with Aesop.And here, this satirical social commentary takes a turn towards the fantastic as Lolly sells her soul to the devil – "a kind of black knight, wandering about and succouring decayed gentlewomen" – and becomes a witch. Of course, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Lolly Willowes (1926) preceded the trend by almost a century.

Yet the fantasy element in Warner’s writing – touched by the fleeting and the feral – includes much we might now think of as queer; and much that in the delineation of individualised sexualities rejects the normative assumptions of patriarchal society. Indeed, Warner was resistant to the map’s representation of a spatialised Englishness that served to reinforce the power structures of social organisation. The End of the Affair': A Correspondence between Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, with an Introduction by Ailsa Granne and Peter Haring Judd". Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved. Her novels include Mr Fortune's Maggot, The True Heart, Summer Will Show, After the Death of Don Juan, The Corner That Held Them and The Flint Anchor.The blue creeks, the wide expanses of green for marsh, the extraordinary Essex place names […] all delighted me’. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything “earthy and warm.