Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show : A Spectre Haunting Europe

The political crisis of the 1930’s and the Spanish Civil War inspired great works of literature by Garcia Lorca, Orwell, Hemingway, Muriel Rukeyser and others, but one of the most surprising and delightful novels of the period is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1936 Summer Will Show, the focus of this talk. Published just as the war began and set in the Revolutionary Paris of 1848, Summer Will Show ends with its heroine enthusiastically reading a draft of The Communist Manifesto. This novel continues one of Warner’s lifelong interests: tracing how a settled, ordinary, middle-class English person changes her mind. In Lolly Willowes, an unmarried aunt blossoms in middle age when she discovers she is a witch; in Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, a middle-aged missionary loses his faith when he falls in love with his only convert. And here, in Summer Will Show, an aristocratic wife marches off to Paris to confront her husband’s lover only to fall in love with her herself. This talk contrasts Warner’s political novel with other political novels of the period, arguing for the power of her insight into what might make a middle-aged person change her mind and her life--the very problem at the heart of politics. Set in a past with strong parallels to Europe of the 1930’s, Townsend Warner explores what it might take to transform an imperious aristocratic wife into a communist.

Anne Fernald, a writer in residence in the Wertheim Study, is the author ofVirginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006) and the editor of a textual edition of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).  Her articles have appeared in Feminist Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Guernica  (online), and multiple edited collections.  Her work pays particular attention to the essay, and this research focus informs her work as the Writing Director (in charge of first-year composition classes) at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. 

Our final lecture on Sylvia Townsend Warner : May 29