The Music at Long Verney, Sylvia Townsend Warner

[callmemadam]

I don’t usually get on with short stories but these I loved. Edited by Michael Steinman, it’s the first time these twenty of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s stories have been collected together. Many of them feature houses and their inhabitants; often they are strangely inconclusive but that’s exactly how they should be. My favourites are the series about Mr Edom and his antique shop Abbey Antique Galleries. Mr Edom himself, his assistant, his stock and his customers seem absolutely real and it’s astonishing how much a short story can reveal when the right person is telling it. I especially liked The Candles. A power cut on a bleak January afternoon inspires the assistant to light up the shop with candles placed in all the candle sticks and candelabra. Everything is transformed, the day quite changed.

One story set me off following a trail and will lead, I hope, to further reading. In Item, One Empty House an unnamed narrator is travelling in Connecticut. Her idea of New England has come from the writing of Mary Wilkins and she is disappointed when told that ‘she wasn’t much thought of now.’ Staying in a house full of bohemian, intellectual types she thinks that she should have said to the people ‘talking about Joyce and Pound and melting pots, “Why don’t you think more of Mary Wilkins?”’ When young, she had read a book called A New England Nun and ‘from the moment when Louisa Ellis tied on a green apron and went out with a little blue crockery bowl to pick some currants for her tea … I knew it was what I wanted. It was something I had already found in nature and in certain teapots – something akin to the precision with which the green ruff fits the white strawberry blossom, or to the airy spacing of a Worcester sprig.’

I was intrigued. Did Mary Wilkins exist, or was she a perfect writer imagined by Warner? Oh the joy of the Kindle. I was in bed when these wonderings began yet I was able at once to look her up and find that yes indeed, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman existed and was a prolific writer. Better still, I downloaded a sample of A New England Nun and other Stories and was able to read the title story. I was as enchanted as STW was by the aprons, the tea china, the precise descriptions of a ‘maidenly’ life of housekeeping; solitary but never lonely. Almost every sentence in Item, one Empty House demanded to be quoted and all the stories are quite beautifully written. Simply lovely and highly recommended.

Kindle hint. The sample I downloaded was in print so small I could barely read it and I couldn’t alter the font size. It may just be that changing font size, like highlighting or searching, is a feature not available with a sample. Even so I’m unwilling to pay for the whole book, just in case.

Comments

[gghost.livejournal.com]

Mary Wilkins Freeman wrote wonderful supernatural short stories, too.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I expect I'm the last person to have heard of her! She's certainly not well known in the UK.

[lethe1]

Ooh! I love Sylvia Townsend Warner.

I have a curious little edition of the title story published by the Academic Press Leiden and "produced by students of the 1992 Van Kopij tot Boek [from copy to book] course".

Isn't it wonderful how you can make new discoveries through books? I once read in an otherwise disappointing book (translated from the Swedish) a beautiful poem by a certain Marie Louise Ramnefalk. She turned out to exist as well, but unfortunately as far as I can tell her poetry has never been translated into Dutch or English (or perhaps at all).

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

You have impeccable taste!

That edition of the story sounds interesting. Apparently STW wrote a lot of Mr Edom stories for the New Yorker but the editor got tired of them, which is why these weren't printed before.

Isn't it wonderful how you can make new discoveries through books?
Yes, and especially when you're young. I was introduced to a lot of poetry through reading Arthur Ransome!

[coughingbear]

Oh, Sylvia Townsend Warner that I don't have! I love her stories and will have to look out for this - I have one US collection and have never known how complete it is.

[ramblingfancy.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Mary Wilkins Freeman either Barbara, but rushed to read the story after your review and loved it too! We'll have to find a good Kindle version. Now must rush or will be late for work!

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I thought you would! Bah to work.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I've only got The Cat's Cradle Book which I picked up years ago and Portrait of a Tortoise, introduction and notes to extracts from Gilbert White's diaries.

[lethe1]

I subscribe to a newsletter by an antiquarian bookseller and shortly after I read your review I received her latest one, offering this title by STW! I ordered it and received it today. :-)

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Coo! Hope you like it as much as I did.