Book description
In the course of her brilliant career Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote
superbly in many and diverse forms but never penned a memoir, properly
speaking. However, from the 1930s to the 1970s she did contribute a
series of short reminiscences to the New Yorker. Scenes of Childhood
collects and orders those reminiscences, thus forming a volume that
reads as a joyous, wry and moving testament to the experience of being
alive. The collection evokes a recognisably English world of nannies,
butlers, pet podles, public schools, 'good works' and country
churches, but the resonances of these stories are universal - funny
and touching by turns.
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) published seven novels, four
volumes of poetry and eight volumes of short stories. She also wrote the
biography of T. H. White, and spent ten years of her life as one of the
four editors of the ten-volume compilation Tudor Church Music. She lived
most of her adult life with her close companion Valentine Ackland. Faber
Finds are reissuing four volumes of her short stories: Winter in the
Air, A Spirit Rises, A Stranger with a Bag and Scenes of Childhood.
