Sylvia Townsend Warner, Thomas Hardy and Music

This article is mainly a documentary record of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s interest in Thomas Hardy’s writing, with a particular focus on its musical qualities and possibilities, as against a critical exploration of the role of music and song in the works of the two writers. It starts with a discussion of the three songs Warner composed from Hardy’s poems when she was working as a composer in the later 1910s. The article presents a previously unpublished 1919 letter from Warner to Hardy thanking him for permission to publish her settings, and gives a context for this plan in relation to her other musical compositions of this period, reproducing some of Warner’s manuscript music. It goes on to describe some performances of the Hardy songs, and includes comments on these from Dr Richard Hall, who edited them for performance. The article ends by briefly citing and discussing Warner’s later remarks on Hardy’s works, especially in the context of Britten’s song cycle Winter Words and Evelyn Hardy’s 1954 critical biography.