SOURCE: "Writing against the Grain: Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Spanish Civil War," in Women's Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 351-68.

In the following excerpt, Brothers examines Warner's contributions to the body of literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War.

Sylvia Townsend Warner is an exile from the pages of literary history, her contributions unmarked even in Gilbert and Gubar's Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Her politics labeled radical in the social text of the twentieth century and her poetic and fictional forms conservative in the Modernist canonical text, she is known by epithet—a lady communist, as Stephen Spender sarcastically dismissed her, and a communist writer who contributed to the Left Review, as those who purport to write the literary histories of the Spanish Civil War and the 1930s list her. Like other women...