Hello, I'm Caroline Clarington from St. John's College, Oxford, and the Oxford English
faculty. And in this little presentation, I'm going to introduce you to Sylvia
Townsend. Warner, one of the more underrated of fantasy writers
in the 20th century. She wrote two key books, one at the beginning
of her career and one at the end. And this is going to be a very brief
introduction to her book. Transend Warner was
born in 1893. Her father was a schoolmaster, a tariff
school, and she was brought up in a fairly unconventional way. She was highly
musical and her plans were to go to study in Vietnam with Arnold Schoenbeck
before the First World War and her father's death put a stop to it. Unlike many
young women of her class, she worked in the munitions factory during the First World War.
But she also started a relationship with a married man. And as a result
of that association, she became an editor of the great collection of Tudor
church music, a 10 volume Oxford University Press publication
which came out during the 1920s. And with which she continued to be involved.
She also was close friends with Theodore Powis, who was the brother
of John Cooper, Powers are quite well-known fantasy writer whose work
is perhaps not so popular today. And she was also well acquainted with Arthur Machen
and his family. Again, another fancy writer whose work is beginning to be rediscovered.
Townson Warner remained independent of her family after her experience of working
in London in the First World War. By 1930, she'd met Valentine Atlant,
who would be her lifelong partner, and they move in together. There's
an interesting biography of townsmen born are written by Claire Harman, which is published
in 1989. And there are also her letters and her diaries. If you're interested
in finding out a bit more about her life. One of the things that interests me most
about Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing is its sheer variety. She never
seemed to write the same novel twice in a row. Lolly Willow's,
the first novel to be published in 1926, about which I'll say a bit more in a
moment, is a fantasy set in the rural south of England. And before that,
she'd written a well-received collection of poetry. She continued
to write and publish poetry through the rest of her life. Lolly Willows
was followed up by Mr. Fortune's Maggette in 1927.
This is a novel, rather, in the vein of W. Somerset Maugham. And it tells of a
missionary, Mr Fortune. And the experiences that he has on the remote
South Sea Island where he's been sent to try to convert the natives
who seem perfectly happy in their own animist religion, really don't seem to want
to be converted at all. A couple of more novels,
rather more realist and set in various historical periods, followed
after Mr. Fortune's Maggette. And they're really rather more like 19th century novels
in their scope and their attitude to character. But after the death of Don
Juan, which came in 1938, was a very different piece of writing.
It drew upon tons and Warner and Atkins' own experiences as volunteers
in Spain in the Spanish Civil War. But it blended that immediate
contemporary kind of reportage with the history and legend of the great
seducer, Don Juan, Don Giovanni, as we know him best, perhaps, and motels
operate the same name. The cooler that held them is
a novel that's been recently rediscovered. It's a long novel, but a kind
of quiet, low key story about a group of nuns who live in and
out of the way convent in 14th century East Anglia.
They lived through the Black Death and various other kinds of historical
events in the 14th and early 15th centuries. And this story is
fascinating in the way that it makes you interested in these
women, many of whom are very similar to one another. You learn about their petty jealousies
that little power plots their passions and their weaknesses.
And we also hear the priest who minister them over the years.
Tanzim Warner was given access to the life materials of T.H.
White, the author best known perhaps for writing the Once
and Future King tetralogy, the first novel in which series
is The Sword in the Stone. A wonderful children's fantasy about King Arthur.
Apelin died quite a long time before Tan, said Warner.
And in the later years after Allen's death during the 1970s,
she published the collection of short stories called Kingdoms of Elfin.
They're published serially in The New Yorker. And that's one of the works that I want
to focus on. In this introduction, I'll say more about Kingdoms of Alphin in a moment.
Only Willa's published in 1926 is a quite remarkable story.
It's a feminist comedy, a fantasy. In
some ways, it's quite satirical and it tells the story of Laura Willow's
or Lolly, as she's known to her nephew, Aunt Lolly. In fact.
When the story begins, LOLLEY has just been forced to leave Somerset,
where she's been living with her father. Her father has died and she was then moved to London
to live with her rather annoying brother, Henry, and his family.
Twenty years of being the maiden aunt of looking after the family
and leading a double life pass very swiftly until all of a sudden
one day, Lollie decides while buying flowers in London that
she will leave London and she buys a guidebook to the Chilterns and gets
on the bus and goes off exploring. She's very taken with the landscape of the
Chilterns, with the beach woods and the high chalk hills. And soon she lights on
a village called Great Mop. And to her family's astonishment, she ups
and moves to Great Mop, where she rents a room from a landlady and
settles in making new friends with her landlady and with the poultry farmer
who lives nearby. And she begins to enjoy her freedom.
The villagers are welcoming. But perhaps in some ways rather reserved. And there's sometimes
some strange noises at night. Nevertheless, Lollie is quite satisfied with
her life. But then her nephew, Titus, now quite grown up,
decides that he will move to great mop as well. He's come to visit Lollie and been very
taken with this charming village. Titus was meant to take over the family
brewing business and become a successful businessman, but he's decided to become a writer
instead. And his arrival in the village ruins the happiness
that Lollie had found because Titus is a typical young man.
Who is not really very self-reliant, though, he likes to think of himself as such. And
soon Loli is being pressed into making sure that his clothes are washed and that he's
fed and that his house is clean and so on. Lollie finds
all this very frustrating. And then shortly after that, she takes up
with a little cat whom she named Vinegar After, which is familiar
in the book that she's been reading. And it's not long after that again.
That's her landlady lets her into the village's secret. The
villagers are, in fact, Satanists, and LOLLEY is taken up into
the woods on the dark night to take part in the witches Sabbath.
And thus initiated, she becomes herself a kind of witch.
She actually meets Satan and sells her soul to him or
least promises herself to him if he will do something for her in exchange.
All that Lolly wants is for Titus to vanish out of her life.
And so a series of more or less comic mishaps begins to overtake
Titus. His milk keeps curdling in the jug. He falls
into a wasps nest and is quite badly stung. And then luckily, a young woman
who rescues him when he falls, since the wasp nest becomes attracted
to him and they fall in love and decide to leave. Great mope and go off
to live in London once again. Lollie recovers her freedom.
And although she knows this, it's cost her, well, her eternal. So
she's not really grateful if that. Lolly Willows was very well
received. It won the pre feminise in France and became very popular.
It's a really interesting book. Quirky, funny and with a distinct tone
which would carry through towns and borders later writing.
Valentine Acton died in 1969, aged only 62.
And Sylvia would live on for another nine years and she never found another partner.
She was perhaps a little lonely in those years and she turned back to the fantasy mode.
The one that had inspired her in her earliest writing of novels, and she begins
on a series of short stories about the world of fairies, which are published
serially for the most part in The New Yorker magazine. The stories
were collected together and published in 1977 as Kingdoms of Alphin.
And that has recently been republished in 2018 by handheld press.
Sylvia's grandmother was Scott's must have told her a great deal about about
fairies in her youth. And it's fairly clear that she bred collections like Catherine
Brigs, great British folk tales, and that this 19th and early 20th
century collections of other British folk tales and other folk traditions.
Her research is warned likely, however. And although the narrators
who are knowledgeable and dispassionate in her stories are able to tell us all the important things
that we need to know about the fairy called some fairy customs that are related, they're
learning as well and very likely indeed. Turns
out mourners, fairies are about four fifths the size of humans. They have wings.
But it's considered rather déclassé to use them. Only working fairies use
their wings and they have the capacity to make themselves visible or invisible,
switched on and off as if with a switch. They're rather like mediaeval fairies.
Before these became tiny tweak for which perhaps we have to blame Shakespeare, in part
these fire is neither good nor bad, but they operate according to the red lights
and they have their own agendas, their capricious, curious, quite petty, in
some ways whimsical, fake kidnap humans who take
their fancy and keep them almost as pets. The Tiffin, the Queen of the Scots
fairies, did truly love Thomas the Rimer, whom she took away the made her lover
for seven years. Various live for many hundreds of years. Unlike the humans,
and when these get elderly, they kill them off or return them rather dazed and unhappy to the
human world. Kingdoms of Elfin encompasses
a good many fairy courts. There's the ancient Scottish courts, the fashionable,
luxurious and highly courtly French courts of Boselli on.
This is a place of great ceremony and very strictly enforced hierarchies. It's
rather like the court of Louis, the 14th of FXI, Louis the Sun King,
except that here they keep werewolves instead of hunting hands. There's
also a rather impoverished Welsh court, a Scandinavian court with absolutely
terrible food, where an ambassador from Posole Omed is sent and has a rather strange
but not entirely pleasant time. And the Persian courts to
the stories abusively written with vivid descriptions and a wry humour.
Yet somehow they're unsettling for the fairies, both so like and yet
not like us. It's hard to call them satirical, yet the view
that they take of hierarchies of self centredness and small mindedness is
often one that does map onto the human world. If you've read Susanna
Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, you may recognise many of the fairy traits
in her. Gentlemen, with the Thistletown hair from that book, Susanna Clock.
So my friend Terry Wendling tells me he's a great fan of Sylvia Townsend Warner.
And her version derives in part from this world as imagined by Townsend
Warner, as well as the traditional fairy lore that they both share.
Elf inor and weasel drawer's likely on the Suffolk folk tale of the green
children. Or is it really a focus? Well, it's hard to say. It's a story that's
found in two late 12th, early 13th century mediaeval chroniclers who
both independently tell a story about a boy and the girl, absolutely
bright green, who were found at the edge of a field. And people are harvesting in the
Suffolk village of Wolf Pitt. The boy and girl come, they say, from a land underground
where there's no sun or moon, but just the kind of twilight. And they've been summoned by
bells to the land of the humans. If you're interested
in these children, there's more about them in the Modern Fairies podcast series in
Episode four, which you can hear from this site. But back
to this story, Alfano is from the Dutch ferry courts at Zel.
And he's on his way to England bearing a letter from the ferry queen. That to be delivered to.
Well, who knows where? He has no idea what's in the letter and when it gets lost. Of course, he's not
terribly concerned about it. The ship runs into a violent storm
and it sinks with all onboard drowned. Except, of course, for Alfano, who can
make use of his wings to rescue himself. He takes off from the mast and he's blown along
by ferocious gale. And finally arrives on
the shore in Suffolk. And there he's rescued or captured.
It depends on your point of view. By Martha Blackburn. Marsha Blackburn
is a herbalist and the alchemist, a fortune teller,
a phoney manipulator of the supernatural. And he's very
pleased to find a fairy whom he can make into his apprentice
and his capacity for working invisibly and his knowledge about herbs and various other things
comes in useful. So must the Blackburne and Elford or more
or less go into business together, though, since he's only an apprentice elfin or gets his food,
lodging and clothing and not very much else. Out gathering
herbs one day, Elfin meets Wiesel, who is green
and beautiful and rather savage in her ways. She's very much a child nature.
She's one of the local Suffolk fairies, or so it seems. And she lives in the
land under the hill. She's fond of eating things raw.
She likes acorns and flowers and nuts. But she also scoffs than a handful of minnows for breakfast
crunching them up. Ethanol doesn't care for that sort of thing. But
nevertheless, they become lovers and. It's a real passion
between them. But when they discover that Master Blackburn is planning to
sell them in London, they decide the famous flea. And what happens next
is related in the next slide. Having discovered the dust,
sadly, plots of the Blackburne to sell them in London as a fairy pair
in a kind of freak show, the two lovers decide that they're better off fleeing.
And they take to the road. This is not
easy, however. They don't have many options, elfin all.
Cannot go and live with weasel's relations because the people under the Hill
are just as fierce as her. And they would murder him. Also, she says they would tear
him to pieces because he isn't green. Alfano himself
realises that he can scarcely take Green Wiesel with her savage ways
back to his civilised and sophisticated court in say she
wouldn't be torn into pieces, but they would reject her because of her green colouring.
The two managed to make a kind of living in the picaresque adventure around
parts of suffered. And they venture into Norfolk indeed and integrate Yarmouth.
Often all can do some labouring work and he soon becomes suntanned. And they gather
little bits of money that way. Wiesel just draws attention because of her
grimness, and she mostly has to hide. But she is, of course, quite good at sealing
and they live a little by pickpocketing as well.
Winter is coming, however, and sleeping in ditches and eating the food that they can
scavenge from the hedgerows is losing its romance and staying in the little
village. They discover that they can take refuge in the church where they realise
people will only come once a week, apparently, and where they can be safe
and sheltered. So they break into the church and they even find some foods,
they drink the communion wine and they divide the communion wafers.
And then a horribly surprised by the arrival of the cleaning ladies who come with their flower
rota already for the upcoming Christmas feast. The two fairies
retreat up the spiral staircase out of the way, the cleaning lady's higher and higher
and higher until they find themselves in the bell loft. This looks warm,
comfortable and safe, and they settled down there to go to sleep. But
it's Christmas Eve and the bells are rung and drum and drum over and
over again by the bell ringers of the village. And this kills the two fairies.
Poor weasel goes first. An elephant all laments over her body
and dies, too. Nobody discovers them because nobody goes up into the bell
loft until the spring comes and then they're buried
in the same grave. It's a kind of romance. A kind of picaresque.
But the story in the sense with no particular moral. So
I think we can read quite a lot of the story of elfin and weasel.
Ferries like humans make snap judgements about people because of the colour of
their skin or because of their education. They're like human doomed lovers like
Romeo and Juliet, who can't find a place where they can be together. They
struggle to survive. And in the end, their encounter with organised religion
kills them. I hope you've enjoyed learning a little bit about Sylvia Times
and Warner and her writing from this short introduction. She's
become increasingly of interest over the last few years. And now there's quite a
lot out about her in the form of YouTube videos, Wikipedia pages
and various other kinds of resources. I'd recommend that you thought
with Lolly Willows. If you want to find out more about her fantasy writing and plunge yourself
into that extraordinary world and get to know Tamsin Warner's particular
quirky tone of voice. And then there are all the other novels to explore.
But at the individual, find Kingdoms of Alphin. A strange,
disturbing and yet in many places, very funny read indeed.
Fantasy is. A matter of building new worlds
for people to explore. It takes us away from our everyday reality.
But at the same time, fantasy is always reaching out back into our own world, telling
us things about this world that perhaps we don't recognise unless
it's transposed onto a new plane set in a new light. Turns mourners
worked, particularly in Kingdoms of Alphin, does this brilliantly, and I hope you'll enjoy
reading some more of her extraordinary stories. Thank you for listening.
Goodbye.