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The Corner That Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Yes! I have all 7 of her novels, but they are old and yellowed. They are Virago which I like though,
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Of course I have to buy this one if it isn’t the Sept subscription book. I hope they publish all of Sylvia Townsend Warner, even though I have all her novels.
Publication Date: September 10, 2019
Pages: 432
Originally published in 1948
A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors.
Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote the The Corner that Held Them, perhaps the most strikingly original of this unfailingly original novelist's works, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history (history as it goes on happening, unimportant history) rather than history as the given sequence of events that, with time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel set in the England of the second half of the 14th century, the era of the Black Death, and that tells of the life of Oby, a Benedictine convent, quite removed from the world and of no particular note. The nuns do their chores and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, they struggle with each other, with themselves, and the book that emerges, in which background and foreground continually shift, is a picture of a world run by women but also a story, stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing, of what is perhaps the most defining but also unobserved of human units, a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity--how do we live through it and it through us?--might be considered the deep question that lies behind this rare triumph of the novelist's art.