Sylvia Townsend Warner - Summer Will Show (New York Review Books Classics)

Winter will shake, Spring will try,
Summer will show if you live or die.

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,