SOURCE: Mulford, Wendy. “Sylvia: The Novels of the 1930s.” In This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930-1951, pp. 104-34. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Mulford traces Warner's literary development throughout the 1930s.

The Twenties' Novels: Links and Prefigurations

Writing a review of Stephen Spender and John Lehmann's anthology Poems for Spain in Life and Letters Today, Sylvia said that those who went out to fight in Spain, unlike those who had, in Owen's famous words, ‘died like cattle’ in the senseless slaughter of the First World War, died as individuals, and as ‘self-willed individuals at that. … They presented their lives … they did not offer up their opinions or their intellects.’¹ It is a statement that applies equally to the way she and Valentine lived their lives during these years.

The meaning of the individual's part in the national...