The Flint Anchor

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

John Barnard, a leading merchant, is a pillar of 19th century rectitude. Though stern with his tippling wife, he is undermined by helpless love for his cold-hearted daughter and the engaging weakling Thomas Kettle.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, British Literature, Modern Classics, Classics, Female Authors

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.

She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I did Sylvia Townsend Warner justice by reading ‘The Flint Anchor’ while struggling to focus because of intense neck and shoulder pain. All her books have quite different genres, settings, and structures, yet she retains has the same distinctively witty voice. Here, the simple tale of a comfortable middle class Victorian family becomes surprisingly dark and subtle in her hands. I don’t have as much to say about it as I would had I been feeling less wretched while reading. Nonetheless, the superficially content yet deeply dysfunctional family dynamics are drawn with great skill. The dialogue is wonderfully acidic and the material details convincing. The tragedies recounted are too minor to attain sublimity, so remain firmly in the realm of farce. For all that, these family tribulations are moving and the characters sympathetic. The constraints placed upon women are made very clear, as are their various forms of escape: religion, good works, alcoholism, etc. The patriarch John Barnard seems in control of the family, yet gradually reveals himself to be flawed, confused, and blinkered. No simple message is conveyed by the story, which has a similar rhythm to The Corner That Held Them. Although I prefer Townsend Warner’s more melodramatic and supernatural fiction, especially Summer Will Show, everything I’ve read of hers has proved compelling and entertainingly subversive.

[lethe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in celebration of Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week (1-7 July 2019), hosted by Helen over at a gallimaufry. It is a historical novel set in roughly the first half of the 19th century, and describes the life of John Barnard and his family.

The Barnards are what we would call nowadays a dysfunctional family. John Barnard, the patriarch, is a stern, religious, righteous man, who is very strict with his children. Although he means well and has a great sense of justice, he is not able to express any warm feelings for them, and they grow up in fear and hatred of him. His only weakness is his pretty but self-centred daughter Mary, whom he loves irrationally and can't refuse anything.

Seeing them grow up and grow old, I was struck by the family's inability to communicate. That, in my opinion, was their biggest flaw. So much pain, heartbreak and frustration could have been avoided if only they had opened their mouths and spoken their minds occasionally. But thoughts are left unsaid and feelings remain bottled up. When finally someone spells out a few home truths, it is too little, too late.

Although some are worse than others, there is not one sympathetic character in the whole extended family, and yet I loved reading about them. This, I feel, is thanks to STW's brilliant writing and sometimes sardonic wit. I'm giving 4 stars for now, but in time I may change it to 5 stars.


There were so many great quotes that I decided to put a few of the longer ones under a spoiler tag (others can be found in the updates):

What he had felt for her was perhaps not so much love as fascination. It was fruitless, and he would turn his mind to marrying someone else. He lived in a world full of eligible daughters and he had no intention of being blighted because he could not get Mr. Barnard's. But though there is such a variety of vegetables, one would feel regret in knowing that never again could one eat cucumber; and it was so that he would always regret the loss of Euphemia. (p. 163)

It was apparent that she took to him, which is always persuasive; it was equally apparent — and to him this was more persuasive still — that she would not have cared a snap of her fingers if he had fallen dead at her feet. (p. 164)

Snipe Cottage had been a gamekeeper's cottage. It had stood empty for some years, it was damp, the smell of old wood-fires hung about it, and Miss Basham's loaned furniture sat in it like exiled Bourbons, magnificent, incommodious, and creaking. (p. 165)

She was in her twenty-fifth year. She was past marrying and a long way from burying. (p. 195)

If you gave people everything they asked for there would be no end to it. In Mary's opinion, it was dangerous. They might seem grateful now, but presently they would look on all these benefits as their right, and then, unless you continued to give way to them, there would be a revolution. Many very wise people — Mary included — felt that it was positively thwarting Providence, who sent these bad times on purpose to make the labouring classes more thrifty and more contented in their station, and also to make them think more of how to ensure happiness in the next world. (p. 219)

She did not warrant herself to last much longer — another two years, three at the most. But with life so nearly over, only a fool, she thought, would spoil the last of it by fretting and remorse. She certainly had not expected to find so much sugar at the bottom of the tumbler; and when the fear of death came up and gave her that little premonitory tap on the shoulder, as of one who says, "Your turn presently," she drove it away with talk of her youth and her childhood. (p. 261)

There he lay, the author (under God, as he would be the first to point out) of Wilberforce's being, and of the being of four other sons and five daughters, five of them dead, two self-exiled; and of untold mischief, fear and discouragement: a man who had meant no harm, who had done his best for his family, who had been faithful to his wife and obedient to his God and loyal to his country, and a model of commercial integrity, and who had spread around him a desert of mendacity and discomfort. (p. 268-269)


Edit August 2022:
Well, my sorely missed text updates have re-appeared, albeit with the wrong dates and with 'Reading for the 2nd time' added. I'll copy the text updates here (sans dates) and see what happens when I remove the most recent 'currently reading'.

– page 19
6.05% "Julia Smith had more to say for herself when she was alone with Robina, but it was mostly to the tune that she would never marry an Englishman. The aunt who had brought her up, Mrs. Maxwell of Phawhope, was second cousin once removed to Mrs. Boswell of Auchinleck and had many stories of Jamey B.'s coarse old Englishman, who wrote the dictionary and was worse than a pig in a parlour. (p. 12)"

– page 40
12.74% "As a Christian he could not conceal what God had seen fit to inflict on him, and as a man of honour he could not muffle up the family disgrace. Oddly enough, this unworldly candour made him respected by the majority of his neighbours, though, being the majority, they were all of the lower class. (p. 32)"

– page 51
16.24% "Much of the [book] stitching was done by pauper children, who also coloured the illustrations to the Moral Tales. They were learning habits of industry and forwarding the Lord's work by working unpaid, but many of them were too young to be neat, and by the end of a day they lost interest and painted blue maws on crocodiles and rosy faces on Negroes singing hymns under the lash. (p. 51)"

– page 62
19.75% "he was not the sort of man who can be good-byed on a doorstep; he would follow one in, talk standing, talk himself towards a sofa and sit down on it, or, if the weather were suitable, talk himself out into the garden. "Come, my young friends," he would say to Ellen and Wilberforce, "shall we enjoy the fruits of the earth? Shall we feast on strawberries?" Fluting like a blackbird, he ate the ripest, (...) (p. 54)"

– page 134
42.68% "As the bit of glass and the foil backing it make up between them a tolerable representation of a gem, Sophie and Simon made up a very fair representation of a happy marriage. His sham benevolence had quite a convincing glow, seen through her desire to please; her prudence gave a respectable glazing to his meanness; and his total selfishness fortified her ambition to make a good show in the world. (p. 122)"

– page 160
50.96% "A little delay in finding the exact hole to drop Thomas into did not matter, but at all costs Mutty must be disposed of before the wedding; and though finding a hole for her was not complicated by exactitude, for woman is a fluid form of matter and can be poured into almost any shaped receptacle, Mutty was as ticklish to manage as a confectioner's boiling syrup. (p. 157)"

– page 207
65.92% "he (...) saw nothing but bad omens, and was certain sure that he would die drownded.
"Why don't you learn to swim?" said Thomas at last, though he knew that Loseby discountenanced learning to swim on the grounds that if you had to drown, you died easier without it. (p. 190)"

– page 222
70.7% "Women conduct life as they conduct their needlework — with small stitches, with buttons and buttonholes, with reiteration of small stabbing movements that build up a smooth-faced untearable garment. (p. 214)"

– page 314
100.0% "the two men immediately found each other congenial, and presently they began a contest of mutual adulation, like two snails cohering in one slime. (p. 279)
Presently a large easy chair was introduced for Peter to relax in. Placed in front of the fire, it made an effective firescreen. (p. 283)"

[Brett Beach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful--written in the early 1950s but hinting at a style and tone much more familiar to modern novels; the third person narration darts and bobs along between the characters; time is sweep up in sentences; whole events pass within a clause. Terrific.

[Tocotin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about extensive cruelty hidden behind benevolence and righteousness.

"As they walked home, John Barnard said, 'I do not like him.'
'Neither do I,' said Euphemia, pleased to find herself able for once to agree unequivocally with her father.
'Perhaps you are too young to form a decision on first sight, Euphemia. In any case you are too young to express it.'"

This kind of behavior from the main character, the patriarch, goes on for pages and pages. Others are not much better, although Euphemia was probably the closest to a character I wanted to care about. On the margins of this ultra-Victiorian middle-class family is the village, the wild home of people who follow their instincts and are not afraid to live – those people I liked.

I'm baffled by the author's almost-acceptance of the everyday cruelty (not only in this book), or rather by the delicate shrugs and irony with which she treats it. It's my problem, arguably, rather than hers. But I yearned for something more.

The writing is stunningly good, as usual, and yet I wanted to put this book down more than once. I'm glad I didn't, but... I'm tired these days and finally I might.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this novel, as I've enjoyed everything else I've read so far by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Similarly to The Corner That Held Them, the main theme is really time itself, along with the observation that the external story/history/image rarely addresses the full internal story.

Although I've read novels before that have included parents who have favorite children, I don't think I've ever read one where that was a primary focus, or that focused on how fixating on one child leads to a toxic family life. John Barnard's un-self-aware obsession with his daughter Mary (which seems due primarily to the fact that she's pretty) renders him incapable of connecting with his other children and becomes the central wound around which the family coheres.

Along with the family dynamics, much more of the novel has to do with the moments in Victorian life in which truth threatens an outward image of rigid conservatism. Unlike a "typical" Victorian novel, there is no simplistic ending to right all the wrongs and put things back to order. The sea, like time itself, is constant and unrelenting, somehow both banal and mysterious, surprising. A lovely novel.

[William Leight · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Flint Anchor” is a blistering denunciation of the English bourgeoisie, all the more so for the simple and even at times sympathetic way it is presented, in the persons of John Barnard and his family. The book opens with the epitaph on his gravestone, a description of a life well lived, and then describes that life, slowly showing that every word of the epitaph is a lie. Barnard is not a bad man, and is certainly a good businessman, but everything he is striving to achieve turns out to be in some way illusory, and the virtues he places his faith in turn out to be defects. The focus is mainly on the slow disintegration of his family, with its worst members triumphing and the best being destroyed or driven out. Warner’s Communist sympathies can just barely be seen, as the contrast between Barnard and the workers he employs is never pushed too hard but lingers at the edge of the picture. Mainly, Barnard is a tragic figure, doomed by his and society’s flaws.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is always humor (mostly humane, sometimes uncanny) in Warner’s fiction, but the ironic, austere detachment in The Flint Anchor also serves to emphasize the flintiness of the emotion(s) that shape John Barnard’s children (and his wife) at their family home in the little coastal town of Loseby during the first half of the 19th century.

While there are momentary reveries that abut the comic—as with daughter Euphemia’s thoughts about a possible marriage with her older brother’s gentleman benefactor, Thomas Kettle’s night aboard a fishing boat, and John Barnard’s decision to marry so he can get rid of unwanted houseguests—so much of the novel’s story is about events that lead to further unhappy passes. The novel’s portrait of John Barnard’s 70-year life—marked by easy worldly success but marred by quashed dreams and emotional upsets—is briskly told, with Warner’s usual careful and nuanced writing, but the accretion of regrets, deaths, petty discord, alienation, and bewilderment produces only a sense of relief when both the novel and John Barnard’s life ends.

There is a final irony—a gaudy, prolix plaque on the family’s cemetery obelisk where Barnard only wished simple engraved dates: Victorian propriety showing undue approbation of Barnard’s worldly influence whilst masking the unhappiness Barnard wrought on his own family. This irony itself is muted, an intimation only of how well the time, place, and circumstances made of Barnard a perfect Victorian.

Warner’s earlier novel, The Corner That Held Them, also covers a similar 70-year duration, and the focus shifts from character to character inside the nunnery, each with her/his own predicaments, and in that story, though there is no single protagonist, Warner evokes a sense of time, how life is led by most individuals with little drama, that there are only small eruptions of activity and emotion touching only one or two individuals at a time. That novel’s inconclusive ending left room for optimism. The Flint Anchor’s story, however, ends with a hypocrisy that frustrates an optimistic interpretation. While Warner makes the life-long journey in The Flint Anchor almost comfortable with a sober prose that nudges the funny bone, I felt little enthusiasm for its destination, with so many lives thwarted in the course of John Barnard’s misguided, ignorant tyranny over his family.

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very individual last novel, skilfully written and better, I think, than Lolly Willowes, albeit very different. It is a reminder of how much bigger the religion industry was in the 19th Century and, indeed, into the 20th. Sylvia TW researched Tudor Church music. The novel shows great familiarity with the Bible and the Anglican Church but her purpose is always to debunk. She shows how John Barnard is shaped by his religion and his temperament and the effect that this has on him and his family. Homosexuality is a key plot element and the special nature of remote seaside communities. This sharply observed novel deserves to survive.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel begins with the details of John Bernard's tombstone. An odd beginning that then winds around and through the life challenges and stresses of an English gentleman in the 19th century. You know that he is going to die, and he knows too, but I think he expects death to come much sooner. In the mean time when life gets tedious he disregards the drama surrounding him and soldiers on, doing the right thing by his social and moral values. It was a challenge given his chaotic family life. In the end he was a good sport.
R.I.P. John Bernard

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Warner narrates the life of John Barnard, Christian pillar of Victorian society. Her observations of Barnard and his family are illuminated with dry humour as she exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian values.

[Tag Bogo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this a tough read , it’s a Simple Story , very Dark .‘A Comic Masterpiece‘ not really far too bleak , No Heroes just stunted lives , Style is Elusive and comes close to being over written , John Barnard is a Monster , but one with good Intention

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ughhh everyone sucks here. No one is able to get out from under the miserly circumstances of the Barnard household, there are no heroes, everyone wriggles along like bugs being tortured by a little boy.

[Redmond Gurney]

Moving this book to dnf, it’s the only book from my entire degree that I didn’t manage to finish, and I tried to restart it with more spare time, but I still can’t get into it. Not for me, I’ll keep it on the bookshelf in case I fancy it one more time.

[Dmitry Nikolaev · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent piece of psychological realism with a slight misandric undertone.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating analysis of how people interrelate and of how their views of themselves may be at odds with the facts, how motivation may not be clear to the person acting and can be interpreted in various ways by others.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5+ Ms. Townsend has yet to write a bad book. How I wish I could have met her.

[Yael · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent book . wish I could find others by the same author in the library or second hand bookshops . as it is I'm waiting for a good economic time for me to order some from the book depository .