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holeymolars · 9 months

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A love letter from Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) to her partner of 39 years, Valentine Ackland (1906 - 1969), written in 1968 when Ackland was on her deathbed.

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'My Love,

Thirty-eight years ago I brought you a little bunch of herbs when you lay ill in a large bed with Sir Walter Raleigh and a tortoise. In all those years, my dearest, I have never doubted your love, nor my own. Much of what's to come is still unsure; but that glorious span of thirty-eight years of love and trust and happiness – care and courage too – will shine on us and protect us. I have always believed in you. Even when you gave me scented shells, I believed in them. You are my faith, I will live and die in it. If I have to live on alone, I will live and die in it, because you believe there is a life after death, I will believe in that too. Our love is the one thing I can never question.

Now in return you must believe that I will be sensible, take care of myself, use Palfrey and the Goring amenities for all they are worth, eat an orange a day, and take care of your possession, your Tib.

My love, my Love. And my heart's thanks for all you have given me, all your understanding, your support, your tenderness, your courage, your trust. And your Beauty, outside and in, and your delightfulness.

Never has any woman been so well and truly loved as I.

Sylvia'

Written on the back

'18.12.1968 6.45pm. This letter is my greatest treasure and must be carefully preserved and given back to Sylvia if I die.

Valentine')

#vintage lesbians #lesbian history #sylvia townsend warner #Valentine Ackland #Love letters #Wlw #my posts

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red-ibis-red · 8 months

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At ease, released from her cares, she had walked homeward. Hedge and coppice and solitary tree, and the broad dust-coloured faces of meadow-sweet and hemlock had watched her go by, knowing.

—Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

#lit #sylvia townsend warner #home

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paunchsalazar · 9 months

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Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

#this was written 97 years ago #and I think it’s better and more fun than the Barbie speech sorry…#Lolly Willowes #sylvia townsend warner #reading #books

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inkliinng · 7 months

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Finished part 1 and it left me feeling a bit melancholy. There's something so tragic about a youth that has passed by like a daydream- golden, nostalgic, but barely remembered. Nothing but a ruffle upon the sea of your life.

#spinsterseptember #book blog #bookblr #booklr #book photography #catblr #lolly willowes #sylvia townsend warner

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literaturecravings · 1 year

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—4th November 1969: Letter to William Maxwell, Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner

#literature #letters of sylvia townsend warner #love letters #alternative literature #old literature #dark academia #light academia #franz kafka #myposts!#diary #old letters #english letters #love letter confessions #sylvia townsend warner #the secret history #dark academia literature #light academia literature

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rherlotshadow · 1 year

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Faery spring cleaning: 'when the brown bed-hangings from the Librarian's bed-chamber are hung on the line and the dust beaten out of them, they are discovered to be cloth-of-gold and fall to pieces.'

#faery #dark fae #sylvia townsend warner #kingdoms of elfin

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mintymarill · 4 months

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When she walked into the meadow it was bloomed over with cowslips, powdering the grass in variable plenty, here scattered, there clustered, innumerable as the stars in the Milky Way. She knelt down among them and laid her face close to their fragrance. The weight of all her unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her bosom down to the earth; she trembled, understanding for the first time how miserable she had been; and in another moment she was released. It was all gone, it could never be again, and never had been. Tears of thankfulness ran down her face. With every breath she drew, the scent of the cowslips flowed in and absolved her.

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner

#Sylvia Townsend Warner #Lolly Willowes #witchy #quote #quotes #book #books

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oldshrewsburyian · 2 years

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Any suggestions for books that have a cozy fall feel to them? I'm trying to read my way to cooler weather :P

I sympathize with this endeavor! I have a double confession to make, though. 1) I am never sure what people on Tumblr mean when they say "cozy." 2) Even though I am fairly certain what "cozy" means when applied to subgenres of light fiction, this is not what I seek when I turn to seasonal fall reading. What I am usually looking for in autumnal fiction is some combination of:

death and decay are inevitable; they can also be beautiful

autumn is a time simultaneously of hope and of reckoning with that hope's disappointment

the academic calendar and academic communities (see also above, tbh)

With, um, all that in mind... some recommendations.

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers. "Let us go now, and have the truth at all hazards" and also "epic actions are all fought by the rearguard" and "if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort."

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (for its gorgeous descriptions of all seasons, and also everything else)

Embers, Sándor Márai (the end of a life and the end of an empire... but maybe not the end of love)

On the Edge of Reason, Miroslav Krleža (I'm pretty sure this opens in September; it is beautiful and poignant and savage)

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner (this actually might come quite close to what you are looking for; this is a lovely and tender and melancholy and hopeful book)

A Small Town in Germany, John Le Carré (small town, large stakes, and Le Carré's customary insight and humor)

Radetzkymarsch, Joseph Roth (this is another end-of-empire one)

Georgics and Eclogues, Virgil (his birthday is in October! lots of lovely harvest poetry and also poetry about destructive love.)

Summer in the Country, Edith Templeton (summer must end, empire must end, deceptions... may or may not)

The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen (the last because in the autumn of 1920, in County Cork, old certainties and old loyalties are about to go up in flames.)

The Salzburg Connection, Helen MacInnes (not only is this that too-rare thing, an espionage novel written by a woman, but the thing I remember best about it is the male protagonist's quotation of/meditation on Rilke's "Herbsttag.")

The Dig, John Preston (this takes place, of course, over a summer, from May to September. But this is 1939, so September is always, always on the horizon. I did not particularly like the beautiful film as an adaptation, but I want a motivational poster of Ralph Fiennes saying "We all fail! every day!")

I hope that at least some of these may be interesting! I also always think Ellis Peters does a lovely job of evoking seasons in her Cadfael novels, and you could do worse than going through and reading the autumnal ones.

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enparallel · 9 months

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Coincidences

Thanks to this ficlet I had a pressing need to go read some Sylvia Townsend Warner. My library has Winter in the Air, so that's what I'm reading.

The very next day I read Danny Lavery's discussion of For Sylvia, containing the story of how Sylvia left her partner Valentine in her ancestral home in order to make space for another lover:

From Valentine:

I write this on a day when I have heard that at any time now another one I love will come to live with me here, in this house where Sylvia and I have lived for twelve years together ... I do not know how this new thing has come about, nor whether it is the work of heaven or hell. I cannot, for more than a moment at a time, realize what it will be like to be here without Sylvia — or anywhere without Sylvia. But I have a conviction that this must be tried; although it is so dangerous that I can scarcely dare measure it even in my fancy.

Danny further quotes Sylvia writing to a friend that the arrangement is a strategic response to her distress, that she leaves with "something more calculating than hope and more tremulous than reason." It works, anyway; Sylvia and Valentine are reunited in about a month.

The title story in Winter In the Air is about a woman named Barbara who has just abandoned the country house where she has lived with her husband for twelve years, because a person called Annelies is coming:

'But why?' she had asked. 'Why must she come and live with you? I thought it was all over, months ago.' 'So did I." 'But Annelies doesn't. Is that it?' 'She is so wretched,' he had said. 'So desperately, incompetently wretched. I can't let her go on suffering like this.'

Barbara moves to London, back to the flat and her friends of twelve years ago. She writes her husband to report her safe arrival, pondering on the task of writing letters of obligation:

One's handwriting sagged down the page as if from weariness, the words 'nice' and 'jolly' dogged one from sentence to sentence, and with every recommencement of gratitude the festivities became more irrevocably over and done with...Yet what she wanted to say to Willie was clear enough...that speech in The Winter's Tale: To me life can be no commodity; the crown and comfort of my life, your favour I do give list, for I do feel it gone, Yet know not how it went ...

I think a ghost manifested biographical context.

#ghosts with opinions #books #sylvia townsend warner #gossip about strangers

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worsip · 2 years

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my thing is niche folkish women in the arts who write from the earth. bonus if they have interesting noses

#mary webb #e h young #sylvia townsend warner #billie marten #clara mann #elanor moss #sheila kaye smith

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diekameliendame · 1 year

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lolly willowes; or the loving huntsman (1926), sylvia townsend warner

#lolly willowes #sylvia townsend warner #book quotes

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carolinawrenn · 7 months

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I am currently reading The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was originally published in 1948, and it’s about a Benedictine convent in the 1300s. It’s a very perceptive and wry look at the way people live in community—even though the nuns are sincerely religious, most of their concerns are with each other and everyday matters. And it’s beautifully written. I thought some of my Invisible Friends would also like it, so consider this a recommendation.

#the corner that held them #sylvia townsend warner #books

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red-ibis-red · 1 year

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All round her the sap was rising up. She laid her cheek against a tree and shut her eyes to listen. She expected to hear the tree drumming like a telegraph pole.

—Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

#sylvia townsend warner #lit

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seab · 1 year

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One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that -- to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

#lolly willowes #sylvia townsend warner #quotes #witches #independence

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factoringprimes-blog · 10 months

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She was a mother, and a landowner; but fortunately, she need no longer be counted among the wives.

Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner

#sylvia townsend warner #english literature

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lionofchaeronea · 2 years

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Current fiction reading is The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner, originally published in 1948. It tells the story of a Benedictine convent in the 14th century, focusing not on any one protagonist or plot thread, but on the women as a community. An unconventional and exceptionally fine book.

#personal #current reading #Sylvia Townsend Warner

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