Given the current debate within SF about politics in genre and whether it is desirable, [Sylvia] Townsend Warner is a peculiarly apposite subject. A lesbian, a feminist, and an active member of the British Communist Party, her work from the beginning was intimately tied up with her beliefs and values.
In a newish column for Strange Horizons, historian and novelist Kari Sperring delves into the women writers of fantasy literature: some remembered and some forgotten, all in need of a larger place in the genre’s history. In this installment, Sperring examines the forgotten fantasy novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose novels quietly and viciously tore at the inequality that characterized female domesticity in the early 20th century (and arguably continues to this day).
