Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Possibilities of Freedom: The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2019

This article considers why Warner’s writing has been undervalued, in particular taking issue with the argument that her works are too radically disparate to be discussed as an oeuvre. It argues that one path through her writings – a ‘handle to get hold of the bundle’ in William Empson’s phrase – is the idea of ‘the possibilities of freedom’, a topic broad enough to address a good deal in Warner’s writings but specific enough to bring some focus. ‘The possibilities of freedom’ – as against ‘freedom’ alone – points both ways, both to what is possible and conversely to the limits of the possible. The essay follows this theme and some of its variations through the six decades and several genres of Warner’s writing life, discussing in particular ‘The Young Sailor’, Lolly Willowes, Opus 7, ‘To Come So Far’ and ‘Oxenhope’. It concludes that we should see her as in no way a quiet, removed stylist but instead as a figure of vigorous cultural engagements, an intellectual contemporary of writings such as Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918), Sartre’s Les chemins de la liberté (1945–49) and Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘What is Freedom?’ (1961).