English Climate: Wartime Stories

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893; by the time war broke out she was an established novelist, and from 1936 onwards her short stories appeared mostly in The New Yorker (approaching 150 of them over the years, even more than Mollie Panter-Downes and Elizabeth Taylor, those other two British women writers who were promoted and revered by the New Yorker editors).

Here are twenty-two stories dating from 1940 to 1946. Lydia Fellgett writes in her Persephone Preface: ‘These stories show a writer seeking to understand what life was like in Britain at war. She worked quickly, without the haze of nostalgia, and (unlike her novels, which moved between the centuries) they were always contemporary, reflecting the texture of what was happening at that moment in time. Her wartime stories therefore epitomise what the historian Juliet Gardiner calls “fingertip history”: a telling of an age that is so close that you can still just about touch it.

Endpaper

Endpapers are taken from Sailors, a 1940-1 Calico Printers Association dress fabric. In a private collection.