But it is her relationship with Minna which allows Sophia to find a truer voice for her own feelings. In a bare apartment the two women enter into a relationship which grows deeper the further the Englishwoman falls into poverty. The property laws of the day entitle her husband to cut her off from the income connected with her estates and for the first time in her life she experiences deprivation. As for the setting that was another disappointment. This was set in Paris, during a revolution! Things should be exciting! A mid-19th century aristocratic Englishwoman who has always chafed at the limited role her life offers women, has "dishusbanded" herself, lost her children to smallpox and so heads to Paris, where history immediately catches up with her, as it is February 1848. She more or less falls in love with and moves in with her ex-husband's ex-mistress (though the lesbian angle is somewhat sublimated), undergoes a transformation of her understanding of class (and, to a lesser extent, race) and by the June days of that year, is standing on the barricades and distributing copies of the just-printed Communist Manifesto. A young woman, unhappily married, Sophia had banished her intellectually inferior, bland husband to pursuits which took him largely to the continent and Paris in particular. She remains on her estate to oversee the rearing of her two young children and generally to scold and bully the servants. Wilful and arrogant, she is contained by something which could be the parameters of an ultimately narrow, unimaginative mind, or perhaps the proto-feminism of an earlier time, when a woman might feel the oppression inflicted on her by society without knowing what name to call it.

I thought for much of this novel that the author had deftly overlaid this revolution of an individual with that of the French. (This is not the *big* revolution we all think of when we think French Revolution. This was *little* revolution. It had a similar result - Napoleon III.) I spent most of this novel remarking to myself that it is a very feminist novel. I came to revise my opinion somewhat, but that would be including even more spoilers here. I'll simply remark that I did not like the direction of the last approximately one quarter of the novel. Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner (6 December 1893 – 1 May 1978) was an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. Summer is the story of a young Englishwoman, indignantly separated from her womanizing husband, whose kids die of smallpox. In the wake of all these disasters, which she finds refreshingly liberating, she journeys to Paris, falls in love with her estranged husband's Jewish mistress, and moves in with her. Along the way, she learns to eschew and shed the Oughts that her stuffy life thus far has been obligated to fulfill, and ends up on the barricades in '48. Sylvia Townsend Warner is, indeed, a Very Good Writer. This novel is probably her most complete in scope, character, and execution. Unlike the complex, difficult, and ultimately ambiguous The Corner That Held Them, this novel is the story of a single, fully-realised character during one period in her life. Unlike Lolly Willowes, Warner had, I think, more of an idea of where she wanted this one to end up, and she reached it. The singular tale of the redoubtable Sophia Willoughby, a lady of a class enjoying extensive property in south west England at a date which can be precisely fixed at the year of 1848.

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a b c d e Maroula Joannou, "Warner, Sylvia Townsend", in Faye Hammill, Esme Miskimmin, Ashlie Sponenberg (eds.) An Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950. Palgrave, 2008 ISBN 0-230-22177-7 (pp. 266-7) Sophia resolves to visit her husband in Paris. She will obtain from him another chance at motherhood even though she knows that he is involved with a disquietening Jewish woman, Minna, whose lifestyle places her amongst the Parisian underclass and its communities of itinerant artists and revolutionaries. Her search for Edward brings her to Minna’s parlour and there discovers the woman’s capacity to enchant audiences with accounts of her life from it origins in rural Lithuania to her present station. a b Darrell Schweitzer, "Warner, Sylvia Townsend", [sic] in St. James Guide To Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. St. James Press, 1996; ISBN 1-55862-205-5 (pp. 589–90).

However, less explainable is that Sophia's wealth comes from a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. From this, she has an uncle who has had a mixed race child with one of his enslaved women, Caspar, who comes to stay with her and eventually is killed dispassionately by Sophia in revenge for Minna's death in what is admittedly a rushed and confusing ending . Despite themes of equality etc. running through the novel Caspar has a flat and racist characterisation, and Sophia takes no responsibility for colonialism or the slave trade, with the usually wry novel having no comment either on the ethics of this. Caspar is a sour note, an object, unredeemable.

Retailers:

a b Jane Dowson. Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge, 1996; ISBN 0-415-13095-6 (pp. 149–58). Steinman, Michael, The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell (Counterpoint 2001) I am always excited to find historical historical fiction - written in an earlier era, about an era earlier than that. I like discovering the way people in the past approached historical fiction, particularly when those people are very good writers.

Indeed, Minna’s personality is captured most effectively when we are told that‘she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery’. Her dramatic nature captures Sophia’s interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion…The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here. I don’t think there was a sexual element in Fortune’s and Lueli’s friendship. At least a conscious one. Though I can accept the argument that Fortune’s unconscious longings may have factored into his decision to leave Fanua; and I have read elsewhere that Warner herself described Fortune as “fatally sodomitic.”However, there are two main issues which I have tried and failed to incorporate into what is good about the book.