Sylvia Townsend Warner

A 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 listener in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of...

Brought to you by Penguin. The nuns who enter a medieval Norfolk convent are told to renounce the world, but the world still finds ways to trouble them, whether it is through fire, floods, pestilence, a collapsing spire, jealous rivalries, a priest with a secret or a plague of caterpillars. As...

Brought to you by Penguin. Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling...

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family - a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and...

This Christmas, 'hand yourself over to be enchanted' (Guardian) by the English genius behind Lolly Willowes. Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman...

When Laura Willowes’s beloved father dies, she is absorbed in the household of her brother and his family. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces.