A selected bibliography

For a full bibliography compiled by Janet Montefiore, download the PDF here.

Monographs

Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics 1930-1951 (London: Pandora Press, 1988).

Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990).

Judith Stinton, Chaldon Herring: Writers in a Dorset Landscape (Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2004). Discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and their relationships with the Powys family, Alyse Gregory, and others.

Ailsa Granne, Women Writing for Women: Life-Writing, Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland (London: Routledge, 2020).

Frances Bingham, Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life (Bath: Handheld Press, 2021)

See also

Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996). Discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner’s poetry and her historical novels Summer Will Show and After the Death of Don Juan .

Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Cross-Writing in the Twenties (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Discusses Lolly Willowes , Mr Fortune’s Maggot and selected short stories.

Essay collections

Gill Davies, David Malcolm, John Simons eds. Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893-1978  (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press, 2006).

Journal Special Issues

Alex Murray and Vike Plock, eds., Revisiting Sylvia Townsend Warner , Special Issue of Literature Compass 11:12 (2014).

Articles and chapters in books

Gillian Beer, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner: The Centrifugal Kick’ in Maroula Jouannou, ed., Women Writers of the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999).

Glen Cavaliero, ‘A Rational Romantic: The Importance of Being Sylvia’, Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2013).

____________ Foreword to Ray Russell, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Bibliography (Leyburn, Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2020).

Terry Castle, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction’, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1993).

Maud Ellmann, ‘The Art of Bi-Location: Sylvia Townsend Warner’, Maroula Joannou, ed., The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920-1945 (London: Palgrave, 2013).

_____________‘Vaccies Go Home: Evacuation, Psychoanalysis and Fiction in World War II,’ Oxford Literary Review 38:2 (2016).

Mary Jacobs, ‘The Politics of Disclosure and the Fable’, Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2006).

______________ ‘Trees and Dreams: Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Pastoral, and Fantastic Realism,’ Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2011).

Janet Montefiore, ‘Listening to Minna: Realism, Feminism and the Politics of Reading’, Suzanne Raitt, ed., Volcanoes and Pearl-Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies (London: Onlywomen Press, 1994).

_____________‘Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Biographer’s “Moral Sense”’, Arguments of Heart and Mind: Selected Essays 1978-2000 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002).

Peter Swaab, ‘The Queerness of Lolly Willowes’, Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2010).

_________ ‘Sylvia’s Similes: A Stylistic Approach to Sylvia Townsend Warner’ in Literature Compass 11:12 (2014).

Kate Macdonald, ‘Witchcraft and non-conformity in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) and John Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927)’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23:2 (2012), 215-238.