The Times Literary Supplement of 12th December 2025 carries a previously unpublished Kingdoms of Elfin story by Sylvia, ‘The Pursuit and the End’, with a commentary by the Society’s Peter Swaab. Here is a link for anyone with a subscription.
Pete can also be heard discussing the story on the 11th December episode of the TLS podcast, Beyond the Bonnet – fortunately not behind a paywall.
‘The Pursuit and the End’ appears with two other unpublished Kingdoms of Elfin stories, ‘Snipe’ and ‘The Alien Element’, in the 2025 issue of the STW Journal, along with other archival pieces. Printed copies are heading to Society members in time for Christmas.
As Chair of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, Jan Montefiore has led the way to rescuing Sylvia Townsend Warner from the near oblivion that descended on her works in the last century. Not only has Jan published some of the finest essays on Warner’s writing and compiled an indispensable bibliography of the critical literature, but she’s given oomph and purpose to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society during her long service as its Chair. What stands out about Jan’s leadership is her generosity to fellow scholars and particularly to the younger generation of Warner enthusiasts. Despite exhausting demands on her time, both academic and domestic, Jan has given her all to encouraging younger scholars to participate in the Society and contribute to its journal. Her mentorship has proved invaluable because of her own outstanding gifts as a scholar and critic. A subtle and discerning reader, Jan is also an elegant writer whose books and essays are lucid, captivating, and often brilliantly funny. Blessed with a seemingly photographic memory, she shows a command of modern history and culture that few scholars could hope to emulate. Her scrupulous historical sense, combined with her sensitivity to what William Empson called the “echoes and recesses” of literary language, makes her an ideal critic for Warner’s intertextual works and endows her scholarship with lasting power. As Chair of the Society, she’s a very hard act to follow, and we can only thank her for her inspiring leadership and dedication.
Members of the STW Society are looking forward to this historic moment in the heart of Dorchester.
The ceremony will take place on Sunday, 14th December at 1pm sharp, outside Goulds Fashion Store (what3words: ///ratio.rugs.clauses)
This is a free public celebration, but please book through Eventbrite to give the organisers an idea of numbers.
Sylvia’s statue will be unveiled by Visible Women UK patron, internationally best-selling author Tracy Chevalier.
Expect a warm and spirited celebration featuring speeches and poetry readings from Dorset’s finest writers, dignitaries and long-standing admirers of Sylvia Townsend Warner. A vibrant gathering of those inspired by her remarkable life, work, and legacy.
It’s Dorchester’s Christmas Cracker Day, so the town will be lively – please allow extra time for parking and crowds.
Join us to share the moment, raise a cheer, and help honour one of Dorset’s most important literary voices.
You are cordially invited to a fundraiser for the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland archive
On Sunday 26th October 2025, 1 till 4pm, at Poxwell Manor, Dorset DT2 8ND.
Tickets £30 in cash on the door.
Having successfully raised the money for the new statue of Sylvia in Dorchester, Visible Women UK is continuing to raise money towards the preservation and proper cataloguing of the STW and VA archive at Dorset History Centre.
Poxwell is a Grade 1-listed historic building and dates from the early 1600s. Built by John Henning , the Trenchard family lived here and there are connections between Poxwell and the novelist Thomas Hardy. There will be a champagne reception with a tour of the grounds followed by speeches and readings by the log fire.
Dr Harriet Baker gave the 2025 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture on Wednesday 22 October at University College, speaking on ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Old Teapot: Archives, Objects and Life-Writing‘.
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 was generously supported by UCL Press and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies, as well as the STW Society.
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.
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.
The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is pleased to announce the Mary Jacobs Memorial Essay Prize 2022. 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.
There are two optional themes for the 2022 essay competition, namely Warner’s writings after 1945, and Warner’s relations with another writer or writers. However, the Society will gladly accept essays on any aspect of the life and work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the prize will be awarded on merit whether or not the submitted essays address the optional themes.
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. There will be two runners-up prizes of £100 each.
Procedure
Essays should not be more than 6000 words, including notes.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, and email and postal addresses. 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 December 2022. The winners will be notified by the Chair of the Society in January 2023.
The winning essay will be published in the Sylvia Townsend Warner Journal in 2023.
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.
The Times Literary Supplement of 12th December 2025 carries a previously unpublished Kingdoms of Elfin story by Sylvia, ‘The Pursuit and the End’, with a commentary by the Society’s Peter Swaab. Here is a link for anyone with a subscription. 
