Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion.Then tragedy strikes- the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband's sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, "magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering," leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades.
Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.
SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893-1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book of- the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune's Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner's biographer Claire Harman, it was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda to Mr. Fortune's Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote. Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T. H. White. NYRB also publishes Summer Will Show, Warner's novel of the French Revolution of 1848. ADAM MARS-JONES was born in London, where he lives and works. His fiction includes Monopolies of Love (1992) and The Waters of Thirst (1993). He writes about films and books for London newspapers.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781590173169 |
| ISBN 10 | 1590173163 |
| Title | Summer Will Show |
| Author | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The New York Review of Books, Inc |
| Year published | 2009-06-16 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |