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Sign up todayThe Corner That Held Them
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Learn moreA unique novel about life in a fourteenth-century convent by one of England’s most original authors
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community.
What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music. She was active in the Communist Party and served in the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Over the course of her long career, she published six more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T. H. White.
Emma Gregory has enjoyed an extensive and varied career. Some of her many radio titles include The Diary Of Samuel Pepys, Don Quixote (with Paul Schofield), The Bell, In the Native State (with Peggy Ashcroft), Dombey and Son, The Quatermass Memoirs (with Andrew Keir), and Great Expectations. She has also recorded Shakespeare on CD for Riverrun Productions and the soundtrack of The Beggars Opera for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She works regularly as a voice-over artist for various companies, including the History and Biography channels.
Reviews
“One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power, and beauty.”
“Warner’s style is delicate and arch…Though she teeters on the edge of satire, she lands instead…on poignancy.”
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