Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Harrow on the Hill in 1893, the only daughter of a history teacher at Harrow public school, and was educated privately at home. Her plans to study under Schoenberg in Vienna were disrupted by the 1914-18 war during which she found work in a munitions factory. An accomplished musicologist, she was one of four co-editors of the voluminous Tudor Church Music. Townsnd Warner is an excellent stylist whose elegantly crafted fiction is remarkable for its narratological rather than its verbal experimentation, as well as a poet whose verse often follows traditional metric patterns. The heroine of Townsend Warner's first best-selling novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), is a middle-aged spinster who flees

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First published 30 June 2002

Citation: Joannou, Maroula. "Sylvia Townsend Warner". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5026, accessed 20 November 2009.]