• Complain

Warner Sylvia Townsend - Summer Will Show

Here you can read online Warner Sylvia Townsend - Summer Will Show full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York, year: 2011;1936, publisher: NYRB Classics;Random House Publisher Services, genre: Non-fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover

Summer Will Show: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Summer Will Show" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

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 husbands sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-

Warner Sylvia Townsend: author's other books


Who wrote Summer Will Show? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Summer Will Show — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Summer Will Show" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents Sylvia Townsend Warner 18931978 was a poet short-story writer and - photo 1
Contents

Sylvia Townsend Warner (18931978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a devoted member of the Communist Party. Her many books include Mr. Fortune and Lolly Willowes (both published by NYRB Classics), The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin.

Claire Harmans first book, a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her most recent book is Janes Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. In 2006 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Summer Will Show

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Introduction by

Claire Harman

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

Picture 2

New York

Introduction

One of the many remarkable things about this novel is the long period of gestation its central character survived, for her conception was casual:

It must have been in 1920 or 21, for I was still in my gaunt flat over the furrier in the Bayswater Road and totally engaged in Tudor Church Music, that I said to a young man called Robert Firebrace that I had invented a person: an early Victorian young lady of means with a secret passion for pugilism; she attended prize-fights dressed as a man and kept a punching-bag under lock and key in her dressing-room. He asked what she looked like and I replied without hesitation: Smooth fair hair, tall, reserved, very ladylike. Shes called Sophia Willoughby.

Twelve years elapsed before this instantly generated character found a home. The author was visiting Paris and, outside a grocers shop on the rue Mouffetard, had another of her flashes of inspiration: to write a novel about the 1848 revolution in France. Sophia Willoughby and another character she had already seen, Minna Lemuel, started up and rushed into it.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this story of the novels inception is Sylvia Townsend Warners insistence that the characters of Sophia and Minna were entirely imaginative creations of long standing and not, as many readers familiar with her life might surmise, based rather closely on her own character and that of her lover, Valentine Ackland. For the Sophia Willoughby of the novel has lost the supposedly defining characteristic of prize-fighting and gained all of Valentines elegance, self-possession, and sangfroid, and Minna, the Jewish storyteller with the spell-binding gifts and irresistible charisma, may not have been intended as a self-portrait but certainly reads like one. The book is, after all, about two women falling in love, just as Warner and Ackland did in 1930. It is also about making common cause with the underdog during a period of violent political upheaval, just as Warner and Ackland did when they joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935 and went to Spain in support of the Spanish government during the civil war. The parallels could be said to be flagrant, yet the author attempts to direct our attention elsewhere.

Summer Will Show, appearing in the autumn of 1936, was the first novel Warner had published for seven years, and the first of her new life with Ackland. In the 1920s, when her best-selling feminist fantasy Lolly Willowes was published, followed by Mr. Fortunes Maggot and The True Heart, Warner was living on her own in London, unprofitably in love with a married man who was old enough to be her father, and who had in fact been her fathers friend and colleague at Harrow School. She had a close circle of friends among her fellow musicologists (Warner worked for more than a decade on the committee of the Tudor Church Music project that brought a vast quantity of sixteenth-century composition into print for the first time); she was a published poet and a sometime composer; and her writer friends included David Garnett and the idiosyncratic novelist T.F. Powys. But in 1930 all the old patterns changed, and Summer Will Show served among many other things as a declaration and celebration of those changes. Like Sophia, the aristocrat who ends up on the other side of the barricades, the author could say, I have changed my ideas. I do not think as I did.

Sophia Willoughby, in the early part of the book, is a wife and mother and a member of the English landed gentry. Divested one by one of her functions, set free from a world policed by oughts, she is alarmed at how little it means to be a free woman. Freedom presents itself as a void to be filled with religion, ambition, travel, learning she considers and rejects them all. Her gestures of defiance misfire; riding to hounds in her period of mourning she has a growing impression that she was out on false pretences, having in reality an assignation with the fox. It is freedom on a different plane that Sophia needs. She hankers after a wild romantic life ... unsexed and unpersoned, but the dream lives up badly to the brief trial it is given on a solitary journey to Cornwall, and she feels forced to turn back to an old course and to try to replace her lost children. It is while she is halfheartedly pursuing this end that she is thrown into the company of her husbands exotic mistress, Minna Lemuel.

Minna is one of Warners most beguiling creations, a self-dramatist and visionary, an artist of great power, yet also a bit of a charlatan. Aging, unbeautiful, unscrupulous, her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all, but her influence pervades the book, from the first intimation of her voice and manner, detected in the way Sophias husband, Frederick, has learned to say Ma fleur, to the inextinguishable sense of her vitality in the empty apartment of the final scenes. Sophias first impressions of this distant rival is of a vulgar Jewish strumpet, but even when Sophia begins to love her, she does so in the knowledge that what good qualities [Minna] had must be accepted with their opposites in an inconsequential pell-mell of wheat and tares. This is the basis of her great attraction:

One could love her freely, unadmonished and unblackmailed by any merits of mind or body. She made no more demands upon ones moral approval than a cat, she was not even a good mouser. One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to.

The plot turns, without explanations, explicitness, or a single blush, on the development of Sophia and Minnas unexpected and immediate sexual attraction to each other. Using sudden jumps in time, as Warner does throughout the novel, their relationship is both exposed to the reader and withheld; we see them, as does Frederick, seated together on the pink sofa, knit into this fathomless intimacy, and turning from it to entertain him with an identical patient politeness. Their unanimity is symbolized in the portrait that the student Dury paints of them, the title of which would serve as a description of the whole book, A Conversation Between Two Women.

Just as this lesbian novel refuses to unpick and categorize the characters sexuality, so there is no special pleading on behalf of the authors own political ideology. Warner leaves the conditions of the laborers on Sophias estate in Dorset to speak for themselves (Sophia herself never really understands them) and places telling vignettes of ordinary life going on, its difficulties and injustices barely breaking on the middle-class characters consciousnesses. Sophias recollection of the 1830 uprising in England is of a procession of men wearing their best clothes, men with washed smocks and oily church-going heads, and the hot harvest weather seems to those of nonlaboring classes to be nothing but a boon. Idealists and exploiters of ideals are viewed in the same clear light. Sophia is approached by the Communists to run errands for them because her class might shield her from suspicion of collaborating, but she is obviously considered expendable by them on the same grounds. We are not spared her slightly acid feelings of having been snubbed by the real revolutionaries, and of not having been thanked enough a wonderfully

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Summer Will Show»

Look at similar books to Summer Will Show. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Summer Will Show»

Discussion, reviews of the book Summer Will Show and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.