The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is very pleased to announce that Dr Harriet Baker will be giving the 2025 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture on Wednesday 22 October at 5.30pm. Her subject is ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Old Teapot: Archives, Objects and Life-Writing‘.
The lecture will take place as usual at UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Room G11 Ground Floor, South Wing Wilkins Building. It will also be streamed live on Zoom.
Harriet Baker is a writer, critic, and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, Paris Review, New Statesman, and the Financial Times. She is the author of the acclaimed study Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, published by Allen Lane in 2024. It was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize and the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
The event is supported by UCL Press and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies as well as the STW Society. The lecture is free and will be followed by a drinks reception. Places are limited, so please book in advance through Eventbrite.
Tickets: To attend in person, make your reservation here. To attend online, please book your place here.
Venue: IAS Common Ground, University College London
“She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood”.
Having been scratched by a black kitten—shortly to become her familiar, Vinegar—Laura finds herself suddenly inducted into her new life: her newfound ‘vocation’ as a witch. The scene marks a similar moment of transformation in the novel to which she belongs, a pivot from naturalism to the supernatural that reroutes its social comedy through the fresh terms of the weird and the eerie. For Laura as for Sylvia Townsend Warner, and for a number of her later protagonists, the persistence of magic in the world serves as a clue for upsetting the established order of things.
Organised by the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society to mark the centenary of Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman (1926), this conference will take Warner’s first novel as an opportunity to explore further the place of religion and the supernatural in her work. In this call for papers, we invite 250-word abstracts for 20-minute contributions that will address the representation of the supernatural in Lolly Willowes and/or Warner’s other fiction, or will consider the complex treatments of religion —in both fiction and non-fiction—present throughout her work. We also welcome comparative presentations that approach Warner’s depiction of religion or the supernatural in dialogue with other authors, be they Warner’s contemporaries or predecessors, or figures subsequently inspired by her work.
The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is pleased to announce the Mary Jacobs Memorial Essay Prize 2026. The aim of the Prize is to encourage further study of the writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, in honour of the distinguished work of Dr Mary Jacobs.
The theme for the 2026 essay competition is the title of a conference to be held at UCL on 29-30 May 2026, namely ‘Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion and the Supernatural’. Candidates for the prize may address any part of this title and need not make specific reference to Lolly Willowes unless they wish to. We are asking candidates to tell us whether in principle they would be able to present a 20-minute version of their essay at the conference (but this will not influence the judging of the competition).
The Award
The prize for the winning essay will be £300, publication in the Society’s Journal and one year’s free membership in the Society. At the discretion of the judges there may also be two runners-up prizes of £100 each.
Procedure
Essays should not be more than 6000 words, including notes but excluding bibliography. They should preferably be submitted in electronic form, or else in hard copy, and should be submitted in two parts – 1) the essay without any identifying details, and 2) a separate document with author’s name, title of the essay, email and postal addresses, and a note about the availability for the conference of a paper based on the essay. Entries should be sent electronically to p.swaab@ucl.ac.uk or in hard copy to The Editor of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Journal, English Department, UCL, London WC1E 6BT.
The deadline for receipt of entries is 31 March 2026. The winners will be notified by the Chair of the Society early in April 2026.
The winning essay will be published in the Sylvia Townsend Warner Journal at the end of 2026.
Terms and Conditions
• The competition is open to all, with the exception of the officers of the Society.
• The judges’ decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.
• The Committee reserves the right not to award the Prize or runners-up prizes if entries are deemed not to merit the award.
• Essays entered must not have been published elsewhere or have publication pending.
• The Society will not contribute towards any expenses incurred by entrants to the competition.
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them (1948) is the subject of the June 2025 episode of the literary podcast Backlisted. The hosts speak with Tanya Kirk, author, editor and the Librarian of St John’s College, Cambridge.
All Society members are welcome to join the Norfolk trip, 26th-27th July 2025. We will be exploring places with an association to Sylvia’s life and writing – see the recent email from Hilary (Membership Secretary) for details. 30th June is the booking deadline!
Over the May Bank Holiday weekend, observant blogger ‘Clothes in Books’ decided to reread The Flint Anchor, her favourite STW novel, and discusses it in a two-part post, here and here.
Formal confirmation of two new Officers: Annie Rhodes (Treasurer), and Hilary Bedder (Membership Secretary)
Treasurer’s report and accounts of 2024-25, generously presented by Helen Jones, the STW Society’s ex-Finance Officer
together with Annie Rhodes. Followed by discussion and important decisions on how we should bank
Ursula K. Le Guin, a member of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, would have been 95 on 21st October this year. In celebration of this, the Society is hosting an online reading by members, chaired by Jan Montefiore, of prose and poetry chosen by members of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. It will take place on Zoom at 6pm on Monday 21st October.
Any member who would like to read should send their choice(s) of reading (up to 3 minutes per person) to info@townsendwarner.com by 6pm on Friday 18th October.
Members will have received an event invitation and Zoom link from the Membership Secretary. If you missed this for some reason, or wish to join the Society and take part, please email Sarah Jane on membership@townsendwarner.com.
Thomas Hardy, Illustration from Wessex Poetry and Other Verse, 1899
In this recent piece in Fortnightly Review, Peter Robinson reflects on this question and on the joint Hardy Society / STW Society weekend in Dorchester in February 2024.
Naming is a potent way to obscure queer people and their relationships. One way this happens is through incorrectly referring to lesbians as friends, companions, sisters, or – a cliché that is now almost exclusively used ironically – ‘gal pals’. This reduces love to friendship, and incorrectly records history.
I recently spotted an example of this on the Faber website where on Sylvia’s author page, Valentine is referred to as Sylvia’s ‘close companion’. ‘Close’, here, is being expected to do an extraordinary amount of euphemistic work, given that the pair were lovers, partners, spouses, wives (pick your term) for almost forty years. Indeed, their ashes were scattered together, and their shared gravestone is a rare material testament to early 20th century sapphic love: ‘close’ doesn’t quite cut it.
When I emailed them, Faber promptly amended this webpage, thanking me for pointing it out. They published Winter in the Air in 2022, in which the biographical note describes Valentine as Sylvia’s ‘partner’, so we can assume that ‘close companion’ was copied from an older text, or was perhaps a legacy of an older version of the site.
The page now calls Valentine Sylvia’s ‘partner… whom she lived with from 1930 until her death’. It is a small change, but one Sylvia would have wanted. In the last of the letters collected in I’ll Stand By You (1998), she wrote to Valentine, ‘our love is the one thing I can never question’; I think she wanted us to know.
The Journal of the STWS is a peer reviewed, open access journal aiming to create a wider interest in this brilliant, original and witty writer. It features scholarly articles, previously unpublished archival works by Warner, and pieces by well-known contemporary writers describing their appreciation of Warner.
The Journal also supports The Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture series, a bi-annual event hosted at UCL, London. The series offers the opportunity to hear from acclaimed writers whose work touches on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s life and works. Previous lectures can be found on the link.
The study weekend organised jointly by the Thomas Hardy Society and Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, led off on Saturday 10th Feb with a day-long mini-conference in the Learning Room of Dorchester Library (which some members may recall from the AGM we held there in 2018), attended by c. 30 people, including members from Cornwall, Lancaster, Manchester, Cambridge and Canterbury (Judith Bond, Gill Davies, Hannah Berry, Maud Ellmann and John Wilkinson, and myself) as well as Peter Swaab and six students from University College, London. I gave a paper on Hardy and Warner: ‘Affinities and Differences’ concerned both writers’ lives in Dorset, their musicianship and how this played out in their works, and their shared interest in ghosts. There were excellent papers on Hardy from two poet-critics: Mark Ford on ‘Hardy’s Elegies for Emma’ and Peter Robinson on ‘Hardy and Warner Haunting Churchyards’. After the lunch break, Mark Chutter of the Hardy Society spoke interestingly on ‘Warner’s Journals’, and Peter Swaab gave an admirable paper on ‘Hardy, Warner and Life’s Little Ironies’. There were lively questions and discussion after each paper, from members of both societies. There was also a book sale, mostly of Hardy books but also copies of the JSTWS, Mark Ford’s new book Woman Much Missed, and Peter Robinson’s poetry collection Retrieved Attachments, all at bargain prices.
Max Gate exterior, with sundial under turret on the right
At 4pm, Mark Chutter led a guided tour of ‘Hardy’s Casterbridge’, including the former office of John Hicks, the architect, whose apprentice the teenage Hardy had been, and the grand house of the ‘Mayor of Casterbridge’ (now the Dorchester branch of Barclay’s Bank) together with the less affluent Fordington area. After a short break, most of us reassembled at 6pm in the Casterbridge Room of the now renovated King’s Arms in Dorchester High Street for a group reading of poems by both writers and by those they had influenced (including John Cowper Powys, Seamus Heaney and Bill Manhire, and also Mark Ford and Peter Robinson themselves), chosen by the readers and chaired by Peter Swaab, followed by the conference dinner.
The whole day was as one member said, ‘really fun and educational’. We were lucky with the weather that weekend, and on Sunday Feb 11th, we gathered again at Hardy’s self-designed home Max Gate on the edge of Dorchester on a morning of early spring sunshine. Our guided tour had been arranged by Mark Chutter. Max Gate was officially shut for the winter but especially opened for us. Several furniture items were covered with dust sheets – for which the volunteers apologised, but which I rather liked as the winter arrangements gave the feeling of a lived-in house rather than a museum. I took a photograph of the outside, with the sundial encircled by its strange Latin motto Quid de nocte? ‘What of the night?’, and Sarah Pattison took a better one of the front hall.
Max Gate entrance hall (note the model of Hardy’s terrier Wessex in the easy chair)
After our tour of Max Gate we went to The Sailor’s Return in East Chaldon, where we enjoyed our group pre-booked Sunday lunch. For this we needed two tables, and I found myself at the table of the Hardy Society, and greatly enjoyed meeting several members there as well as seeing old and new friends from the STW Society. Peter Swaab then led a guided tour through East Chaldon to the parish church of St Nicholas, where we admired the lovely appliqué Nativity made by Betty Muntz and the East Chaldon children, with its portraits of Chaldon animals known to the children. Sarah Pattison and I both took photographs of it, neither of which is entirely successful (we had problems with the reflections on the glass in front of it) but both give some idea of its charm.
East Chaldon Nativity (Jan’s photo)
East Chaldon Nativity (Sarah’s photo)
STW and VA memorial by Reynolds Stone
We then went to the churchyard, and viewed the STW and VA stone with its motto non omnis moriar: ‘I shall not wholly die’.
Beth Carr
We then saw the once sinister building that’s now the red-brick Rectory, in the 1930s an orphanage in which servant girls were notoriously exploited by the Rector’s wife, arousing concern in the village and a petition organised by the writer Llewellyn Powys and signed by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. This led to a national scandal and a summons for libel in 1935, whose costs of £1000 were awarded against the three (£1000 in 1935, equivalent to £89,120 in 2024, was a vast sum especially for freelance writers – but the scandal got the orphanage closed: a victory of sorts, however expensive). Lastly we stood outside TF Powys’ house, Beth Car, designed and built by Hardy’s brother – now with a conservatory extension, but still the same red brick villa.
Then the majority of us went home; but because I was staying the Sunday night for an appointment in Dorchester on Monday, I was able to visit the marvellous Elisabeth Frink exhibition in Dorchester Museum. This is on until April 24th and I urge anyone living near enough not to miss it. Here are two items: a photo of a large print, and of her maquette for her 15-foot statue Risen Christ over the porch of Liverpool Cathedral, her last sculpture.
A Joint Study Weekend between the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society and the Thomas Hardy Society
From 09:30, Saturday 10th February until 17:00, Sunday 11th February 2024
At Dorchester Library, South Walks House, Charles St, DT1 1EE
Although not born in Dorset, the author and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner fell in love with the county when she visited Chaldon Herring and the surrounding area in the 1920s. The weekend will consider Hardy and Warner’s writing against the backdrop of a Wessex Landscape. Speakers will include Professor Jan Montefiore, Professor Peter Swaab and Mark Damon Chutter.
There will be a three-course meal (£35) served in the evening in the Casterbridge Room, King’s Arms, Dorchester. Please contact Kings Arms to book directly on 01305 234 234.
