Sylvia Townsend Warner was born on December 6th, 1893, to a middle-class family in Harrow-on-the-Hill, England. It was only with the posthumous publication of Warner's Collected Poems in 1982 that the extent and significance of her poetry became evident, with poems ranging in date from 1914 through to 1978. Eric leads her to the overgrown orchard of an abandoned cottage, where, amid the fruit trees, she begins to sew. She published a biography which The New York Times declared "a small masterpiece which may well be read long after the writings of its subject have been forgotten. She is ‘estranged’ from her landscape; ‘Day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself further from her.

Setting out in 1922, after abandoning her map, she traversed the liminal marsh landscape in contented solitude. Jeremy Burchardt describes the rapid urban developments of the 1920s and 1930s as an ‘intense phase of suburban growth’ in Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800 (London: I.Becoming lost on the marsh, it is through her bodily awareness of her surroundings that Warner inhabits her environment. After Warner's death in 1978, her ashes were buried with Ackland's at St Nicholas, Chaldon Herring, Dorset. Su visión de la mujer es la que otorga a esta novela esa vertiente subversiva que la emparenta con la obra de Jane Austen y Virginia Woolf». Her novels correspondingly present a detailed rejection of normative masculinist approaches to landscape, espousing instead an alternative ruralism built upon feminist and queer identity.

The capacity for imaginative vagrancy in Warner’s characters – for psychological wandering, even while their bodies are still – is reflected in her formal explorations of their fractured subjectivities. Certainly, Laura enjoys female company, but she also desires solitude: ‘While she lived her solitudes were hers inalienably; she and the kitten, the witch and the familiar, would live on at Great Mop, growing old together’ (LW, 146). Sukey, too, is described in terms of her animality; she becomes a ‘quick-breathing creature with shining eyes’, and ‘a young wild-cat’ (TH, 53, 75). The description anticipates the development of her tactile relationship with the natural world; at Mr Saunter’s chicken farm at Great Mop, Laura enjoys holding hens in the crook of her arm, ‘while her fingers probed among the soft feathers and rigid quills of their breasts.It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I will go to my grave now,” and had left the room. It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies. The critical and personal hostility that greeted the jointly authored Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933 effectively put an end to the public poetic careers of both Warner and Ackland. Sukey’s sensory immersion in the marsh landscape awakens her appetitive pleasures, representing her emergent sexuality.

Lucky In Art Unlucky In Life" (fee required), The New York Times, 21 April 1968; retrieved 10 February 2008. Her spatial disorientation is mirrored in her subjectivity: ‘now all her memories of her former life were disused, and her past thoughts were strange to her […]. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. Warner produced several books of poetry, including Opus 7, a book-length pastoral poem about an elderly female flower-seller. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.Sukey’s hands have a metonymic relationship with labour, and yet as she sits sewing beneath the pear tree, her indus-triousness signals pastoral contentment.