Sylvia Townsend Warner Read online

  Claire Harman

  * * *

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

  A Biography

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Chapter 1: 1893–1917

  Chapter 2: 1918–1930

  Chapter 3: 1930–1937

  Chapter 4: 1937–1947

  Chapter 5: 1947–1950

  Chapter 6: 1950–1969

  Chapter 7: 1969–1978

  Bibliography of Works by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  References

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Claire Harman is the award-winning biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1989), Fanny Burney (2000) and Robert Louis Stevenson (2005) and the author of the bestselling Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2009). She writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. Her most recent work is Charlotte Brontë: A Life (2015).

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

  Praise for Sylvia Townsend Warner

  ‘A living and revelatory biography, as passionate and truthful, elegant and enchanting as its subject. Claire Harman restores Sylvia Townsend Warner to her real place as, in her best works, second only to Virginia Woolf among the women writers of our century’ George D. Painter

  ‘A fascinating and moving tale, told with insight, sympathy and objectivity’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Harman skillfully weaves Sylvia’s stories and letters into the biography, and the brilliance of the samples on display constantly takes you aback … Outstanding’ John Carey, Sunday Times

  ‘Really interesting and totally gripping. It evokes a person and a period and a whole world in a very effective way’ Victoria Glendinning

  ‘As lively and perceptive as this idiosyncratic, rewarding writer deserves’ New Statesman

  Praise for Robert Louis Stevenson

  ‘A delight from beginning to end … Stevenson has found a worthy biographer at last’ John Carey, Sunday Times

  ‘Superbly readable’ Evening Standard

  ‘Full, rich, intelligent and smooth … a continuous pleasure to read’ Allan Massie, Literary Review

  ‘It takes real skill to preserve a sense of overall shape, as Harman’s excellent biography does. Her judgements are crisp yet unobtrusive … she allows Stevenson to bring himself to life, letting his peculiar sparkle flicker through’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Both the life and the writing are irresistibly entertaining’ Theo Tait, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Vivid and engaging … Stevenson emerges from her pages as a vital, courageous, contrary and exhilarating figure’ Times Literary Supplement

  To A.M.P.

  Illustrations

  1 Sylvia, her father and his spaniel Friday in the mid-1890s.

  2 ‘Tib’ in her sailor’s hat.

  3 Sylvia and her father skating in Switzerland, c. 1909.

  4 George Townsend Warner in a form room at Harrow.

  5 Percy Buck.

  6 Nora in the 1920s, after her marriage to Ronald Eiloart.

  7 Charles Prentice, Sylvia and Theodore Powys outside Beth Car in the late 1920s.

  8 Molly (Valentine) Ackland in December 1914.

  9 Sylvia in her flat at 113 Inverness Terrace.

  10 Miss Green’s cottage.

  11 Valentine’s wedding to Richard Turpin, July 1925.

  12 Valentine at Winterton in 1928.

  13 Bea Howe and Sylvia at Frankfort Manor.

  14 Valentine feeding the cats at Frankfort Manor.

  15 24, West Chaldon.

  16 Valentine and Sylvia at West Chaldon with Kit and Pat Dooley, Victoria the goat, Towser and Tom.

  17 Sylvia, Valentine and Asuncion in Barcelona, 1936.

  18 Frome Vauchurch.

  19 Sylvia in the garden at Frome Vauchurch, 1948.

  20 Sylvia and the cats in Valentine’s sitting-room, 1960s.

  21 Joy Finzi’s drawing of Valentine dead, November 1969.

  22 Sylvia at her desk overlooking the river, 1977.

  Acknowledgements:

  5, Harrow School Archives; 10, 14 and 15, Janet Pollock; 21, Joy Finzi; 22, John Miles; 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, Dorset County Museum.

  1

  1893–1917

  I

  On 5 December 1893, the bell of Harrow School Chapel was tolling for one of the school governors, a Professor Tindall, who had died the day before. Only thirty feet away from the bell-tower, across the road, lived George Townsend Warner, an assistant master at the school, and his young wife Nora, who fell into labour at the alarming sound of the knell. She was expecting their first and, as it turned out, their only child, who was to be called Andrew, a name associated with the landed side of Nora’s family. Old Doctor Stiven was called out to the Warner’s house and at six o’clock the next morning, Wednesday 6 December, the baby was born, plump and healthy. And female.

  News of the birth reached Rickmansworth by wire before breakfast time, where Nora’s three orphaned siblings and three unmarried aunts kept house together. Aunt Annie, leading family prayers, burst into tears at the thought that Nora’s parents, both dead that year, had never seen their first grandchild. Purefoy, Nora’s fifteen-year-old sister, took a more cheerful view. The birth of a niece was the brightest spot in a year draped in mourning, and she bounded round the garden joyfully despite her black dress.

  The baby was renamed Sylvia Nora.

  George Townsend Warner and Nora Hudleston had been married for sixteen months before Sylvia’s birth. They had met in Newton Abbot, Devon, where George’s father was headmaster of Newton College, a school for boys, and Nora’s father was retired from the Indian Army, a colonel on half-pay. Nora (whose full name was Eleanor Mary) had been born in 1866 and brought up in Madras, where as the eldest of four surviving children she enjoyed longer than any of the others the years of her parents’ prosperity. She had a pony, a devoted ayah, extravagant clothes, extravagant tastes, and by the time the family moved back to England, their fortune lost by the collapse of an Indian bank, Nora was unwilling and unable to be disciplined by either parent. She was ‘an extraordinarily pretty girl’ and ‘very fascinating’,1 as her sister said, and indulged many flirtations, although she also developed ‘an efficient way of boxing the ears of married men’ – a business-like attitude. Even when money was short, Nora’s social activities were not subdued. She made her own evening dresses, ingeniously copied from the French fashion papers, and went to all the best Newton Abbot parties and dances. Perhaps it was at one of these that Nora, looking supremely confident, haughty and conspicuous, met Mr Warner’s son George and fell in love with him fiercely and for his lifetime.

  George was an engaging young man with a deep-set, intense regard, moustaches and very long legs. When he met Nora, he was still up at Cambridge with a scholarship to read history, studying under Cunningham and Creighton in what was called the new ‘scientific’ method. His seven years at the university were gloriously successful: he gained the senior place in the Historical Tripos in 1887, the first Whewell Scholarship in International Law in 1889 and a fellowship at his college, Jesus, in 1890. ‘Landmarks of Industrial History’, which Warner was to publish later as a book, caused some ‘confusion of face’2 among the Tripos examiners, for this alarmingly direct young man with the low, clear voice had covered fully all the questions that could then be set on his subject, and done so in a concise two hundred and fifty pages.

  On leaving Cambridge, George accepted a job at Harrow School as an assistant master, thereby continuing his family’s long connection with the famous public sch
ool. He and his father were both Old Harrovians and his grandfather, the Reverend George Townsend Warner, had been a master there from 1846 to 1853 under Dr Vaughan. The Reverend George’s most notable achievement was the consolidation of two villas into one house, West Acre, known as ‘Warner’s long range’, after a contemporary laughing-stock, a long-range missile for use at sea invented by a Captain Warner. ‘I was foolish enough at Harrow to think my prosperity would last forever’, the Reverend George lamented in 1861 to his son, also George Townsend Warner (known to his parents as ‘Townsend’), then expensively idling at Trinity College, Cambridge, and showing more enthusiasm for racquets than for Classics. When the Warners moved from Harrow to Torquay, where the Reverend George took over the running of Highstead School, their fortunes turned and never recovered. Bad health, money worries and a touching, if rather overwhelming concern for his son’s spiritual welfare, dogged the ageing headmaster, whose own devoutness was solemn and simple. Contemplating the dangers to which young Townsend was exposed at Cambridge was an agony: the opera, the ballet, drink, the summer months ‘perilously full of cricket’, Bishop Jowett’s view of Thessalonians … and his son did nothing to reassure him, writing back to renewed pleadings that he should study, ‘I have a strong aversion to Plato in any shape’.3

  The Reverend George died in 1869, the year after Townsend received his M.A., having given him a job as tutor at Highstead in anticipation of his son being unemployable elsewhere. Townsend had taken holy orders and a plain, lively, highly intelligent Scots wife, Flora Jane Moir, who was almost four years his senior. The couple had to make do with rather modest accommodation in Torquay, a far cry from Flora’s native Edinburgh and the stimulating, literate circle in which she had grown up. But they did not have to stay there long, for in 1875 Townsend, who was far better suited to teaching than his father would ever have supposed, was offered the headship of Newton College in Newton Abbot. The Warners settled there with their young son George, born in 1865, and his younger siblings Flora (Sissy), Robert (Bertie) and Euphemia (Effie).

  One of the boys at Newton College, Arthur Quiller-Couch, wrote later in his memoirs of how the new headmaster ‘did actually and at once revolutionise the place for its good’; ‘under Warner’s hand miracles began and continued to happen’.4 Warner brought with him from Highstead the best of the staff there and raised standards in the school so rapidly that Newton (an unendowed establishment, relying on its reputation) could soon afford a new chapel, laboratory, fives court, squash court, cricket field and pavilion. A lazy scholar himself, he had become an admirable pedagogue; strict and energetic on one side, fatherly and essentially pleasure-loving on the other, ‘a gentleman with every attribute of a good headmaster’, as Quiller-Couch noted, ‘save a sense of justice, of which he had scarcely a glimmer’.5

  This man who was ‘our Prospero’ to the boys of Newton College was known to his children as ‘the Chief’. Photographs show him most often in a sea of family and friends, wearing a cricketing cap and a grey, wedge-shaped beard. They are always on holiday, in Argyllshire or Ettrick. Flora, a rather well-upholstered lady in a plaid, is seated on a chair; Townsend is lounging on the grass or leaning one foot on a wall. Their children look healthy and happy: young George is holding a shotgun and a spaniel, and around the edges of the group stand numerous ghillies, exhibiting the bag.

  George, writing to Nora Hudleston, re-created the conversation on one of these holiday shoots, the members of which were himself, ‘the Chief’, Bertie, a lugubrious guest called Harry, and Murray, the ghilly:

  – Now we must go on after that bird … I know exactly where he is …

  – Did you see him down?

  – No, but I know exactly where he is … you saw him Murray?

  – Eh, I couldna mark him. He went oot a ma sight round yon bit knowe … He’ll no gang far … Maybe he might reach the bottom …

  – Good Lord!

  – Come on

  – Sam you’re a very nice dog, but I don’t want you; you smell; go away to your master. Mr Warner will you kindly call Sam?

  – Here Sam come here good dog … Good heavens how you do stink … What a misfortune it must be to a dog to stink like that …

  – He certainly is high this morning.

  – Now we’ll just go straight for that bird .. He’s dead .. I know exactly where he is – in that glen where the bracken is so thick … Hullo, where’s the whip? .. I’ve lost it … I know where I left it.

  – Eh I’ve got the wheep Maister Warner. Ye dropped it jist where we were pickin’ up the burds. Eh syne ye promised me saxpense whenever ‘a found it we hae na lost ane eh afore d’ye mind hoo’ many ye lost at Drumelgier. Eh a ken …

  – Good heavens Murray don’t make such a row. Why you’re enough to frighten every bird off the place. I wonder there’s anything left between here and Cnoe Moy – Murray!

  – Yes Sir.

  – Don’t make so much noise.6

  George was at Cambridge, finishing his M.A., when he wrote this. Nora, his fiancée, attended the graduation ceremony in 1891, thinking when she saw him enter the theatre that ‘immediately everyone else looked shapeless and uncouth’7 by comparison. In August 1892, when George had completed his first year as assistant master of one of the Modern Side fourth forms at Harrow, he and Nora were married at St Paul’s Church, Newton Abbot. ‘The Chief’ officiated at the ceremony, as he did at the baptism in the same church twenty months later of his granddaughter Sylvia. By the time the young Warners could get down to Devon, the baby was already strong and curious, and held on to Townsend’s wagging beard so fiercely during the christening that he was distracted and named her Cynthia by mistake. But it was put right later in the register.

  II

  Dame Armstrong’s House, Harrow-on-the-Hill, where Sylvia was born, was a square, light-stuccoed Georgian building. The ground floor windows on the west side looked onto Church Hill, exactly opposite the spot (commemorated by a plaque) where Anthony Ashley Cooper saw the pauper’s burial and turned his mind to social reform. The ground floor windows on the east side of Dame Armstrong’s looked down a drop of almost fifteen feet to the pavement of High Street, so steep was the fall of the hill under the house. The Warners shared this home with E.M. Butler, another master at the school and the baby’s godfather, but did not stay there long after Sylvia’s birth. Together with the nursemaid, the baby, the rocking-horse and the spaniel, George’s beloved Friday, they moved to a tall semi-detached villa at the top of Waldron Road, Radnor Lodge.

  Harrow in the 1890s was still a small town in Middlesex, surrounded by countryside and innocent of the Metropolitan Line. From her nursery window Sylvia was possessor of ‘a most entrancing view […] endless, rich and classically handsome: meadows, and the enormous solitary elms of that clay soil, belts of woodland, here and there sober pale-faced eighteenth-century houses showing through their baffle of trees; and the Thames Valley mists thrown over it like a gauze.’8 Down the steep stairs from Sylvia’s nursery were the dining room and the drawing room, down further were the kitchen and scullery and, in a semi-basement, George’s workroom, with half a view of the rockery. This room was long and divided by George’s interests; at one end were his books, the fireplace and a dhurry-draped wicker settee, creaking under Friday; at the other end was a carpenter’s bench, a rack of smooth, oiled tools and the enormous rocking-horse, ten hands high, which had come from Newton Abbot and his youth, and on which he still rode, book in hand, rocking to the metres of Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or the Border ballads. Sometimes Sylvia was hoisted up in front of him; the soft voice and the melancholy words made her throat swell, she did not know why. The horse creaked and juddered in the dusky room.

  Sylvia’s favourite place in the house was the attic boxroom. Here lived a dome-topped trunk, hat boxes, her father’s old-fashioned opera hat, an alarming dressmaker’s dummy and numerous dresses with large sleeves and tight waists, rustling mysteriously. It was the oddness of the assortment
that appealed to her, and the privacy of the room, for she was a lone child who did not mix easily with her peers, but whose imagination was always at home in a boxroom. Other places were not so congenial, such as the den by the coal-cellar where knives were sharpened and the scullery, which the child also disliked, but on the whole Radnor Lodge was a bright and interesting house, enlivened by Nora’s Indian print curtains and gay eiderdowns, by the carved lion-legs of a table and the shining painted knobs of a chest of drawers. It was the Warners’ first and last unshared house, and Sylvia was especially happy in it. Between her father in his workroom and her mother in the drawing-room, playing Heller studies on the grand piano, Sylvia lacked little. The woman played, and the little girl danced round in a rapture. And from this verse, which George composed, it would seem her parents were happy there too:

  How well-contented in this private grange

  Spend I my life, that’s subject unto change;

  Under whose roof with moss-work wrought, there I

  Kiss my brown wife, and black posterity.9

  According to her aunt, Sylvia was ‘an abnormally intelligent child, even at an early age’,10 eager, observant and self-possessed. ‘Sylvia has early attained to the dignity of her first dining-out,’ wrote George to his mother at Christmas 1898, ‘and though she will be torn away by inexorable fate in the shape of her nurse and perambulator at seven, I daresay she will contrive to cram as much amusement into her one glorious hour as grown-ups do into a whole evening. More perhaps than they gain where pork chops and turnips on silver plate form the second entrée.’ Sylvia’s earliest memories are all happy, even ecstatic; the superlative joy of rolling down a daisied slope, eating butterballs out of the larder, running away from her nurse through the scented shrubs of the nursery garden and the forbidden rapture of licking her finger and squeaking it gently across a window-pane. Dressed in blue serge and wearing a sailor-hat and the name of a warship, the little black-haired girl bowled her hoop down the lanes between Harrow and Roxeth, making up tunes and peering into ditches with passionate longing to take home the discarded objects she saw there: old kettles, single boots, blue enamelled saucepans. Her nurse, nasty Florence, always thwarted these enthusiasms and considered her charge to be very unrefined, ‘a child with low tastes’.11