Underground Influence: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Pastiche of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Freeman’s work lived on into the 1920s through the 60s, even after Freeman lost her main audience. This claim is explored through examining her long-term transatlantic influence on the twentieth-century writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. The chapter analyzes Warner’s essay, “Item, One Empty House” as a reflection on where sexually nonconforming women writers fit in national literary histories. After using the essay to demonstrate that Freeman is an important precursor to Warner, the chapter traces an intertextual relationship between Warner’s fiction of the 1960s, particularly “A Love Match” (1964), and Freeman’s sexually explicit story, “Evelina’s Garden” (1896). The essay proposes that progressive female-to-female influence is structured differently to Harold Bloom’s model of influence, featuring a broader array of emotions including anxiety but many other emotions as well.