WARNER, Sylvia Townsend.

£475 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Mr. Fortune's Maggot. First edition, first impression, the author's ownership inscription on the head of the front free endpaper and subsequent book label of Daphne Muir on the front pastedown. Muir, a South African poet and author, moved to England in 1927 and the two authors developed a friendship. Warner records dining and attending classical music concerts with Muir in her diary.Warner wrote Mr Fortune's Maggot as a result of a vivid dream and recalled finishing it in a state of semi-hallucination. The novel, "an appealing blend of cleverness, oddity and pathos... rich in imagery and extraordinarily sensual descriptive prose" was incredibly popular, both in the UK and the US, where her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926), had been an unexpected sensation (Harman, Biography, p. 71).Warner was in the centre of an active literary community and was close friends with many of the modernist authors to whom she is now compared. Prior to her novels she published a collection of poetry, The Espalier (1925). In her life and writing Warner worked against societal norms: she was active in the Communist Party, travelled to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War to work with the Red Cross, espoused "unconventional moral fables" in her Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) and lived as a married couple with her partner, the poet Valentine Ackland, for 38 years. Their love letters were published in 1998 under the title I'll Stand By You and "constitute an extraordinary lesbian love story" (ODNB).

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