Sylvia, with a loved and loving cat
Dear friends and readers,
Let me place this foremother poet blog with my Austen Reveries in honor of Austen’s possible lesbian spinsterhood, and yet regard it as an overdue extension of my other foremother blogs celebrating Jane Dowson’s Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. There I told of five women poets of the left: Nancy Cunard, Winifred Holtby, Ruth Pitter and Valentine Ackland, the last of whom from 1930 on was the life-long partner of Sylvia Townsend Warner, who doesn’t need me to commemorate her: as, gentle reader, there’s a beautiful website, recordings of her reading her poetry, blogs which pick out her most beautiful private poems, to say nothing of a great biography by Clare Harman, and insightful essay on her and Valentine Ackland (see essay in comments).
Nonetheless, tonight I want to live through her poems as a poet of the solitary and solitude and at the same time echo others who have reminded the world that Townsend wrote and acted as a passionately politically committed woman of the left, tireless in her concern for the poor, deprived, and vulnerable, for cultural freedom and intellectual liberty, an anti-fascist, a radical spirit. Dowson’s selection omits the fairy poetry, everything that can be seen as twee, and offers strongly anti-war, Muriel Ruykeyser kind of verse, lesbian love poetry in the modern mode.
Some Make This Answer
Unfortunately, he said, I have lost my manners.
That old civil twitch of visage and the retreat
Courteous of threatened blood to the heart, I cannot
Produce them now, or rig up their counterfeit.
Thrust muzzle of flesh, master, or metal, you are no longer
Terrible as an army with banners.Admittedly on your red face or your metal proxy’s
I read death, I decipher the gluttony to subdue
All that is free and fine, to savage it, knock it
About, taunt it to stupor, prison it life-through;
Moreover, I see you garnished with whips, gas-bombs, electric
barbed wire,
And affable with church and state as with doxies.Voltage of death, walking among my fellow men
Have seen the free and the fine wasted with cold and hunger,
Diseased, maddened, death-in-life doomed, and the ten
Thousand this death can brag have reckoned against your thousand.
Shoddy king of terrors, you impress me no longer.
Song for a Street-Song
What, do you plan for children now?
A child is a pretty thing,
A thing of promise, a tender thing.
Day by day, year by year,
You love it more. War is near,
And dogs and strangers choking in the gas fume
Is a calmer spectacle than the fruit of the womb.
There’s the sting
When the drums go rub-a-dub!
There’s the rub!What, do you plan for marriage now?
Love is a handsome thing,
A thing of tenderness, a growing thing.
Day by day, year by year,
If It knits you more. War is near,
And flesh that lay beside you in marriage-bed
Mangles your own he an when it is ripped and shred.
There’s the sting
When the drums go rub-a-dub!
There’s the rub!What, do you plan for freedom now?
Freedom is a noble thing,
The mind’s sanction, a vital thing.
Day by day, year by year,
It claims you more. War is near,
And freedom in muck of warfare maimed and defiled
Is a bitterer hazard than loss of mate or child.
There’s the sting
When the drums go rub-a-dub!
There’s the rub!We plan for love and children now,
And freedom, that noblest thing.
We gather to us everything
That’s growing and tender, vital and dear,
To arm us more. War is near.
Against that enemy pang of the quickened sense
Is the swiftest weapon, is the surest defence.
There we cling
While the drums go rat-a-plan!
So we plan!
Drawing You, Heavy With Sleep
Drawing you, heavy with sleep to lie closer,
Staying your poppy head upon my shoulder,
It was as though I pulled the glide
Of a fun river to my side.Heavy with sleep and with sleep pliable
You rolled at a touch towards me. Your arm fell
Across me as a river throws
An arm of flood across meadows.And as the careless water its mirroring sanction
Grants to him at the river’s brim long stationed,
Long drowned in thought; that yet he lives
Since in that mirroring tide he moves,Your body lying by mine to mine responded:
Your hair stirred on my mouth, my image was dandled
Deep in your sleep that flowed unstained
On from the image entertained.
West Chaldon, one of Sylvia and Valentine’s homes
******************************
A young Sylvia Townsend Warner, with kitten
I should say at the outset that until a few years ago I didn’t know that Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote poetry, nor that I had a volume of her Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman in my house until Jim and I joined Library Thing and we catalogued our library. Then I discovered my treasure. I had thought of Warner’s books as Jim’s books: two volumes of fairy stories, biography of T. H. White, an Arthurian. Jim likes fantasy reading and enjoyed the tales especially Kingdom of Elfin. I believed he tried the T. H. White biography. This is not my thing. But then I read Claire Harman’s collection and introduction; Harman writes excellent biographies: her Fanny Burney is beautifully written, and has the merit of being the only one of the biographies frankly to demonstrate how fictionalized are the journals and diaries, and to argue this is inevitable, and does not detract from their greatness, indeed is partly responsible for it. Her Jane’s Fame commits the rare feat of providing new insights, new careful close reading — to show, among other things, that her family was generally against her having a vocation or career as a writer.
Sylvia Townsend Warner is known best for her fantasy stories and as a lesbian; her work is usually presented as belonging to the world of Arthurian Glastonbury romance of the type the Powys brothers were writing in the 1930s, a set of people and writing turning away from the modern technological industrial world. What is forgotten is the Powys brothers and those who wanted to turn away were often profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-materialist; they belong to the world described by Patrick Wright in his The Village that Died for England, and On Living in An Old Country, or (simply) Tank. She is not to be classed (as she sometimes is) with the kind of child-conservatism found in Dodie Smith’s comic masterpiece, I Capture the Castle.
Reading Warner’s poems reveals a Bronte-like undercurrent, grim, filled with despair, horror, quiet dread and the humor is hard. Harman says these poems could be fitted very well in one of Powys’s Arthurian romances; better yet, let us look at the currents as not unlike Thomas Hardy. And they are wholly unlike the child-like tone of Tolkien at times, and have nothing of the complacency of Sayers in her verse (who also was part of this upper class genteel set of the later period). They do seem a woman’s poems (the despair, melancholy, indirection) and often there is something strongly gothic in the pictures of the houses (haunted of course). Blake too, the brief ones with their sudden stinging protest (however muted what is being protested against is) with titles like “The Little Lamb.” Wonderfully she is outside what counts somehow and seeing futility and yet anguished over it. The best are very quiet.
Now here are two of these in her fairy vein:
From The Espalier (1925)
What voice is this
sings so, rings so
Within my head?
Not mine, for I am dead,And a deep peace
Wraps me, haps me
From head to feet
Like a smooth winding-sheet.Before my eyes
Reeling, wheeling,
Leaf-green stars
Have changed to purple barsAnd flickered out,
Spinning, thinning,
Up the wall,
That has grown very tallOnly that voice —
Distant, insistent;
Like the high
Stroked glass’s airy cry;Echoing on,
Winds me, binds me
As with a thread
Spun from my own head.O speak not yet!
Forget me, let me
Lie here as calm
As saints that nurse their palm;Whilst like a tide
Turning, returning,
Silence and gloom
Flow in and fill the room.
Some of her poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop. This might seem a far-flung analogy, but the tone and indirect of the metaphoric surface are alike to me. So the following reminds me of Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.” Warner is a poet of solitude:
Also from The Espalier:
Sitting alone at night
Careless of time,
From the house next door
I hear the clock chimeTen, eleven, twelve;
One, two, three —
It is all the same to the clock,
And much the same to me.But to-night more than sense heard it:
I opened my eyes wide
To look at the wall and wonder
What lay on the other side.They are quiet people
That live next door;
I never hear them scrape
Their chairs along the floor,They do not laugh loud, or sing,
Or scratch at the grate,
I have never seen a taxi
Drawn up at their gate;And though their back-garden
Is always neat and trim
It has a humbled look,
and no one walks therein.So did not their chiming clock
Imply some hand to wind it,
I might doubt if the wall between us
Had any life behind it.London neighbors are such
That I may never know more
Than this of the people
Who live next door.While they for their part
Should they hazard a guess
At me on my side of the wall
Will know as little, or less;For my life has grown quiet,
As quiet as theirs;
And the clock has been silent on my chimney-piece
For years and years.
Sylvia Plath’s (yes the poet Sylvia Plath) Wuthering Heights
King Duffus
When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned,
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?
Her rhythms are insistent and strong. Not that I’m against the fairy poems: Townsend Warner created an internally consistent fantasy world — perhaps Tolkien would be comparable in this. Perhaps little known are her individual books of poems and how these intertwine. These two come from Boxwood (1960). In the first you see that Warner was another woman poet who looked back through to her mothers in writing, to earlier women:
Anne Donne
I lay in in London;
And round my bed my live children were crying,
And round my bed my dead children were singing.
As my blood left me it set the clappers swinging:
Tolling, jarring, jowling, all the bells of London
Were ringing as I lay dying-
John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone!Ill-done, well-done, all done.
All fearing done, all striving and all hoping,
All weanings, watchings, done; all reckonings whether
Of debts, of moons, summed; all hither and thither
Sucked in the one ebb. Then, on my bed in London,
I heard him call me,. reproaching:
Undone, Anne Donne, Undone!Not done, not yet done!
Wearily I rose up at his bidding.
The sweat still on my face, my hair dishevelled,
Over the bells and the tolling seas I travelled,
Carrying my dead child, so lost, so light a burden,
To Paris, where he sat reading
And showed him my ill news. That done,
Went back, lived on in London.
I know we don’t forget what a hard life Anne Donne had but it’s not common to bring her alive and use Donne’s refrains this way. Warner opens her book with a series of lyrics called “Boxwood” which interweaves myth, books, landscape. This is the fourth:
The book I had saved up to buy
Was come, and I
Unwrapped it and went out to be
In privacy,
As though to read such poems were
A kind of prayer.
And any bank, and any shade,
Will do, I said,
To be the temple of this hour
So why not here
Where these old creaking chestnuts frown?
There I sat down
And read the poems; but the tree
Spoke them to me.
You can find very hostile remarks by Warner on women readers and feminism (by-the-bye); this too was common in the pre-1940s era. Yet Lolly Willowes (1926) is the story of a spinster who becomes a witch and was nominated for the Prix Femina The Corner that held the World is about medieval nuns (very eccentric); in Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927) we meet a missionary sodomite out to convert others.
Some bibliography:
Valentine Ackland, For Sylvia: An Honest Account, London, Chano & Windus, 1985.
Barbara Brothers, ‘Writing Against the Grain: Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Spanish Civil War’ in Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, eds, Women’s Writing in Exile, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, PP·350-66.
Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography, London, Chatto & Windus, 1985; London, Minerva, 1985.
Claire Harman, ed., The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, London, Chatto & Windus. 1994.
William Maxwell, ed., The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner, London: Chatto & Windus; New York, The Viking Press, 1982.
Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland … Life, Letters and Politics 1930-1951, London, Pandora, 1988.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘The Way By Which I Have Come’, Countryman, xix, no. 2, 1939. pp. 472-86.
PN Review 23, vol. 8, no. 3. 1981, special edition on Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Sylvia and Valentine’s first home
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Lightning from skies (from The Guardian)
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s passionate love poetry became profoundly sad as she experienced betrayal, bereavement and old age. It’s time her genius was more widely recognised, argues Claire Harman
Shortly before her death 30 years ago, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to the publisher of her planned Selected Poems, “it is the most astonishing affair for me to be taken notice of in my extreme old age”. Her surprise was understandable: she hadn’t published a book of poems since 1934, though her first collections had won plaudits from AE Housman and Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Yeats had included her in his Oxford Book of English Verse. In the meantime, her novels, including Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The Corner That Held Them had gone through the whole cycle of acclaim, neglect and rediscovery; her New Yorker stories had a devoted following, but hardly anyone remembered her first success as a writer. She couldn’t help being ironical about it, saying “I intend to be a posthumous poet!”
A reviewer of her debut 1925 collection, The Espalier, had commented on Warner’s “un-Victorian mind”, a rather restrained description of a young woman whose poetry went against the grain of the Georgians and the Modernists. Not many poets of the period would have dared put the word “bum” in a poem (“Blue Eyes”), nor juxtaposed it with sombre pieces like “The Lenten Offering”, “The Soldier’s Return” and “I Bring Her a Flower”, Warner’s tribute to the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. She was supremely confident in her own powers at the time, claiming in 1929 that poetry was all she wanted to read or write: “My fingers drop myrrh. I really am writing a poem a day.” So why did this bullishly energetic poet stop publishing?
It happened around a somewhat ill-conceived initiative of her own. In 1930, Warner fell in love, madly and for life, with Valentine Ackland, a promising poet 12 years her junior. Soon after the two women began living together, Sylvia had tried to recommend Valentine’s work to her publisher, Charles Prentice, who visited the couple at their home in Dorset and “talked about publishing”, as Sylvia recalled in her diary. “I think he would have made a proposal [ …] were things not in such a bad way now. As it was, he counselled that she should write more, and more let-out-ly.”
The use of the hoary excuse of current business difficulties and the advice that Valentine might do well to change her manner entirely should have been more than enough to signal Prentice’s real feelings. But 15 months later, with no offer forthcoming on Valentine’s poetry, Sylvia came up with another plan, to send their work out as a single volume under the joint authorship of TW and VA. She wrote “a most suavely blackmailing letter to Dear Charles”, as Valentine noted amusedly in her diary, and after some deliberation, Prentice accepted the book, clearly feeling the pressure from his bestselling author and friend. Sylvia was delighted, though Valentine had reservations privately. “I still have a lingering desire to be only myself – but I suppose it is foolish to wish so”, she wrote, “at least: to wish to appear so publicly.”
Whether a Dove or Seagull appeared in America first, in November 1933, and in Britain the following March. The concept of TW and VA had gone; both names appeared on the title page, but there were no attributions within the text. On the dustjacket was an assurance that “the authorship of specific poems will be given by the publishers on request”, but few readers would have been encouraged to apply by the authors’ preface, explaining their design:
Of the poems in this book 54 are by one writer, 55 by the other. No single poem is in any way the result of collaboration nor, beyond the bare fact that it contains the work of two writers, is the book collaborative. The authors believe that by issuing their separate work under one cover the element of contrast thus obtained will add to the pleasure of the reader; by witholding individual attributions they hope that the freshness of anonymity will be preserved. The book, therefore, is both an experiment in the presentation of poetry and a protest against the frame of mind, too common, which judges the poem by the poet, rather than the poet by the poem.
The “Note” challenged the reader to adopt an attitude of strict impartiality from poem to poem and savour the distinctness of each, while presenting texts that keep wanting to re-knit into a conversation between two intriguingly different voices. The dynamic between the two poets was unmistakeable, even if the gender of “Valentine Ackland” wasn’t. Several reviewers assumed she was a man, and those who knew or guessed otherwise didn’t remark on the eroticism of the love poems:
For long meeting of our lips
Shall be breaking of ships,
For breath drawn quicker men drowned
And trees downed.
Throe shall fell roof-tree, pulse’s knock
Undermine rock,
A cry hurl seas against the land, a
raiding hand, scattering
lightning along thighs Lightning from skies
Wrench
That was Warner; Ackland was even more explicit, and employed some arresting imagery: “My hand, being deft and delicate, displays / Unerring judgement; cleaves between your thighs / Clean as a ray-directed airplane flies.” The only person to record his response to this was the book’s unwilling dedicatee, Robert Frost, who wrote privately to Louis Untermeyer of his disgust and perplexity:
You won’t take it as an infringement of the liberty of the press if I ask you not to connect me with the book any more than you have to in your reviewing and lecturing. Don’t you find the contemplation of their kind of collusion emasculating? I am chilled to the marrow, as in the actual presence of some foul form of death where none of me can function, not even my habitual interest in versification.
Frost dithered for weeks before sending a note of acknowledgement, utterly at a loss how to address “that couplet in England???”.
Most of the reviewers seemed glad of the distraction provided by the “experiment in the presentation of poetry”, which became the focus of every review, conveniently displacing the issue of lesbianism and the need to address the poems themselves. The depersonalising device was “not wholly a new one”, the TLS thought, refering to the precedent of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, “nor can it be quite accounted complete”. Austin Clarke in the New Statesman felt the poets were trying to “bedevil” critics – a remark which could only have pleased Warner, though she certainly did not want to bedevil ordinary readers, indeed felt anxious on that count.
Almost as soon as the first copies of the American edition were in their hands, she and Ackland anticipated that the experiment with anonymity might provoke irritation in “our island critics”; also that it was very likely to disadvantage Valentine at her debut. When they gave Llewelyn Powys a copy of the book and asked who he thought had written each poem, he credited all Valentine’s best work to Sylvia.
Subsequently, a key was added at the back of the British edition, but far from quelling criticism, it generated more:
No doubt an idealistic impulse has driven both into protesting against the weak-mindedness of those who judge by names [ …] Nevertheless, Miss Townsend Warner and her fellow-poet actually encourage this disgusting frame of mind, for they provide at the end of the book a four-column index of page-numbers and their respective initials. In fact, they give poor human nature all the distracting material for a guessing competition complete with solutions.
That crushing description of “Miss Townsend Warner and her fellow-poet” indicated that the anonymity the authors had been striving for was only likely to apply to one of them. Whether a Dove or Seagull in effect put an end to the poetic careers of both. Valentine became increasingly despondent about her talent and ability to reach an audience, and is only now, with the publication of Journey from Winter (Carcanet, 2008), about to have her due. Sylvia’s decision not to submit another collection, jointly or singly, after Whether a Dove or Seagull, has to be seen as her recognition of a disastrous error of judgment.
Warner and Ackland became frequent contributors to the left-wing periodicals of the 1930s, with trenchant poems about Spain and the build-up to war. There was an air of bitter amazement in Warner’s poems long before 1939; after the fall of France in 1940, this turned into a crystalline clarity and harshness. “Road, 1940” is an extraordinary depiction of the disintegration of human sympathy as soon as individual survival is threatened while “Recognition” concludes that there can be no special case made for one’s own casualties in war:
This was an English child that lay in the road.
They told me to weep once more, but I found
No tears, and though the mourners then
Threw stones at me in grief’s and God’s name
I had no blood to quicken for God or man.
For I remembered how to my childhood had come
Hearsay of Justice. Now, overhead,
Rang the inflexible music of her sword;
Blindfold she went over with sure tread.
I knew, and acknowledged her, and adored.
The poem was published in The Nation in December, 1941, and reprinted in the 1982 Collected Poems, but has attracted very little commentary. It is too severe, perhaps, for many people to stomach.
Warner could rise magnificently to this sort of public eloquence, but she also wrote a great deal of personal poetry, and the end of the war, which coincided with a period of intense unhappiness over the threatened break-up of her relationship with Ackland, saw an outburst of heartbreaking lyrics, published for the first time now in her New Collected Poems. She kept these very private verses to herself, not even including them in the parcel that she left for posthumous publication:
O here is my left hand and here is my right hand,
And I on myself cast up as on a desert island, In my right hand a dagger and on my left hand a ring,
And from under my feet the earth falling.
O here is my beginning, and here is my ending,
And at my bedside the armoured day standing,
Saying, Rise up, my lost one, and begone
Into reality as into a prison.
Warner got used to being a private poet and found a freedom in it (rather like that of her painfully eloquent diary) to articulate the suffering she endured through Ackland’s infidelity, withdrawal of passionate intimacy and finally from the irrevocable loss when Ackland died. Sometimes, this inmost writing shows a ferocity and acuteness that she could only trust to herself. The poems are often profoundly sad – especially those about her bereavement and old age. They are not only very beautiful, but written in the loneliest circumstances:
With morning I inherit
The evening’s merit:
Emptied garbage pail,
Rinsed towel on the rail,
Kettle reversed, solitary
Cup and platter left orderly,
Floor mopped and dried –
Detritus of a day;
The day I put away
Thinking with remnant pride
“All will be right and tight
If I die in the night.”
This mocking merit
Each morning I inherit.
When Warner’s prediction of being a posthumous poet came true in 1982, with Collected Poems, she emerged as a sort of “sleeper”, the ghost contemporary of the “Martians”; Hughes and Gunn; as well of Larkin, Auden, Bridges, even Hardy, Housman and Mew, for her earliest dated poem, “Hymn for a Child”, is from 1914, the latest, “Changed Fortune”, from 1977. She had been of the times for more than 60 years, but out of them too.
I wonder whether or not it is possible for Warner to be inserted retrospectively into the canon, regardless of however many admirers she has now or in the future. The record is, to some extent, sealed, and she is on the outside. But though she may not appear in literary histories for many years to come, if her work is kept in print, her penetrating and rather shocking genius will find an audience.
I also came across a lovely little write-up entitled ‘An Affair to Remember’ by Rosemary Dinnage on I’ll Stand By You’, the letters (to each other) of Warner and Ackland.
Later this evening I’ll add a couple of poems. I didn’t represent her poems to earlier women or any of her poems to books and art. I do love your blog.
Claire Keyes asked:
“What’s the story about Anne Donne? Please enlighten us.
Ann Fisher-Wirth:
“I don’t understand the reference to Paris, in the poem “Anne Donne.” Thanks for explaining! best wishes,
Ann”
Ann also wrote:
“She had many children and died young. but, she and John Donne were much in love, as I understand their relationship, and he was grief-stricken at her death. his sonnet “Since she whom I loved has paid her last debt” is about that. ”
To which I replied:
“Ann Fisher-Wirth is right — generally. The two married against their parents’ desires and were very poor at first. As I recall (but memory is treacherous) Donne himself had to convert to get a position, and needed to crawl back. So they were a pair of rebels to start with. Worn down, especially she. I’ll come back tonight with some more detail. Ellen
Anne Donne had twelve children in sixteen years of marriage, and died in consequence of the last one. It’s true that Donne appeared heartbroken after she died, and the couple certainly went through very difficult times immediately after their secret marriage in 1601. She was of a much higher social stratum than she, the niece of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. Donne was Egerton’s chief secretary, and the couple met at Egerton’s London home, York House in the Strand, close to the Palace of Whitehall, then as now a centre of power. After the marriage was discovered, Egerton promptly had Donne thrown in jail when the marriage was discovered, though he later relented. The couple struggled in poverty for some years though, until they were reconciled to her father in 1609 and received her dowry. In the meantime they relied heavily on the generosity of her wealthy cousin Sir Francis Wolly, who housed them at his country house. Considering that she had almost a baby a year, this was highly generous.
So far, so romantic. However, in practice their marriage was not always harmonious and Donne spent much time travelling back and forth to London, seeking any kind of employment. He wrote verse praising people who paid him to do so, among other things. Finally in 1615 he took holy orders at the King’s persistent request (having converted from Catholicism some years earlier and written a couple of anti-Catholic tracts, possibly in a futile attempt to gain employment at court) and gained some modicum of income. However, Anne did not live long to enjoy this, as she died (along with the baby) in childbirth in 1617. Unusually for that time, especially as he had a large family, Donne did not remarry, so it is probably true that he mourned her deeply. Certainly the poetry he wrote later in his life is far more religious and gloomy than the glorious songs and sonnets of his womanizing youth.
Jennifer Doughty
Warner means her poem to contrast the lives of John and Anne and re-direct the famous refrains of his poem so as to bring out her life. A common fate Anne had: many children and then died. Ellen
Claire Harman suggests that Warner has turned into a semi-forgotten woman, and Harman does her real justice in a review that appeared in TLS for October 5, 2012, pp 3-5, which is not publicly online. Harman quotes her so aptly — and how varied she was. It probably doesn’t help that she was lesbian and she and her friend communists. In a review of Katherine Mansfield as a letter writer Warner wrote of letter writers (Cowper, Dorothy Osborne, Byron, Sevigne)
Look, they say. These black signs on white
paper, they are me. My blood ran with this ink.,
here, where I turned the page, it was pain to
stem the flow, even for an instant, so strongly
the current ran toward you. This is me, here I
am. This is what I feel, what I think, what I do.
This is the lizard I am seeing, this is the lunch I
ate. The sun is shining on me, now it has gone
in and I feel the cold. I have put on the painted
shawl. To-night what is left of me after I have
finished this letter will be unhappy and alone;
but I am happy with you, and what I am now is
here, is in your hand as you read.
E.M.
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