The Corner That Held Them: Virago Modern Classics

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from NYRB Classics), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Over the course of her long career, Warner published six more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White. NYRB also publishes her novels Mr. Fortune, Summer Will Show and The Corner That Held Them.

Claire Harman’s first book, a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë and has edited works by Stevenson and Warner. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006 and became President of The Alliance of LIterary Societies in 2016.

A classic, whose resonance deepens inside the reader in proportion to its austere, luminous discretion. Also, as it happens, a work of high, frequent comedy. As an act of imagined history this novel has few rivals
A spellbinding piece of historical fiction-spare, luminous. . . . One starts rereading as soon as one has reached the last page
A magnificent recreation of the life of a medieval convent