Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Revolutionary Garden Georgic

Abstract

This article appraises the role of the country garden in the interwar development of Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing and politics. Reading Warner's interrogation of genre and form as an example of the Georgic, it examines her published texts alongside personal papers and garden spaces to demonstrate how she worked to interrogate, and highlight, the social costs of misrepresentative literary landscapes. As she considered what it meant to inhabit a rural country cottage, and then a small country house, as a poet with keenly felt social responsibilities, her texts and gardens provided a way to work through her landscape anxieties. The cultivation of landscape on and off the page informed her development of a radical way of writing about landscape, and the gradual development of a radical politics.