Sylvia Townsend Warner

(1893 - 1978)

Born in Harrow on the Hill, England, the communist writer and musicologist Sylvia Townsend Warner worked in a munitions factory during World War I and served with the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War. She published the novels Lolly Willowes and The Corner That Held Them, among others, as well as biographies of T.H. White and Jane Austen; 144 New Yorker short stories; and a ten-volume study of Tudor church music. “I felt no heart in writing,” she wrote in her diary in January 1970, “but at least it seemed a natural occupation. Nothing else is.”