Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Question of Feminism

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a self-supporting writer who attacked the subordination of women, celebrated energy and freedom in women, and lived openly in a lesbian marriage. Yet she has not become a feminist heroine: perhaps because her activism was left-wing rather than feminist, perhaps because of her hostility to bossy, entitled women. She loved her father who educated her informally, and her links with his former male pupils at Harrow were important during the 1920s in establishing her as a literary presence. She attacked patriarchal oppression in her fiction, from her first novel, Lolly Willowes, to her last, The Flint Anchor. Of her few essays directly addressing gender politics, the most important is ‘Women as Writers’ (1959), written in unspoken dialogue with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which Warner praises women for outwitting the conventions meant to silence them and for the ‘immediacy’ of their writing.