Lecture on French Literature

The article presents a previously unpublished lecture on French literature, given by Sylvia Townsend Warner to the Lewes Literary Society on 28 November 1960, prefaced by a letter from Warner to William Maxwell, enclosing a copy of the lecture. She surveys five centuries of French literature, starting with Villon and Rabelais and continuing up to Proust and Sartre, with a particular perspective on the relations between religious authority and French culture, and on ‘the lurking theologian in French writers’.