Sylvia Townsend Warner

In her acclaimed debut novel, the twentieth-century English writer "moves with somber confidence into the realm of the supernatural, and her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it. This is the witty, eerie, tender but firm life history of a middle-class Englishwoman who politely declines to make the expected connection with the opposite sex and becomes a witch instead" (John Updike). When Laura Willowes's beloved...

"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend...

T H White, author of The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Book of Merlyn, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died at sea from a heart attack in 1964, aged 58. The eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner was asked to wrote his biography, the only study of his life, now republished for a new generation. The biography was published in 1967 and was Warner's greatest critical success since her first novel,...