{"id":14,"date":"2026-11-03T05:07:26","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/?p=14"},"modified":"2026-11-03T05:07:26","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:07:26","slug":"a-past-most-queer-remembering-sylvia-townsend-warners-radical-gay-historical-fiction-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"A Past Most Queer: Remembering Sylvia Townsend Warner\u2019s Radical Gay Historical Fiction | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Queer historical fiction is having a moment. Acclaimed recent novels have imagined queer lives in settings as varied as Puritan New England, antebellum Mississippi, and England during the first World War.<br \/>\nFor LGBTQ+ readers, the genre\u2019s appeal isn\u2019t hard to <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar daddy vs sponsor<\/a> understand. Reading queer historical fiction lets us imagine our way into the gaps in the historical record\u2014to undo our own erasure.<br \/>\nIt\u2019s ironic, then, that one of the twentieth century\u2019s finest works of queer historical fiction has been almost entirely forgotten.<br \/>\nPublished in 1954,<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\nis the final novel <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">free sugar dating Philippines<\/a> by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Best remembered today for her debut novel,<br \/>\nLolly Willowes<br \/>\n(1926), Townsend Warner went on to write another six novels\u2014as well as several volumes of poetry, nine collections of short stories, a translation of Proust, and a biography. (And that\u2019s not even mentioning her letters.)<br \/>\nCritics often cite Townsend Warner\u2019s remarkable range as the reason she isn\u2019t better known today. As her biographer Claire Harman observes, her oeuvre lacks \u201cthe impression of coherence upon which a loud reputation depends.\u201d Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics, makes a similar point. \u201cThough utterly individual,\u201d he says, \u201cshe never cultivated a trademark style or subject\u2014each of her novels is different from the last.\u201d<br \/>\nThey are, in short, queer historical fictions\u2014albeit ones <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar dating photo verification<\/a> written before the genre had a name.<br \/>\nThe settings of her novels certainly vary widely, taking place everywhere from a sleepy convent in medieval England to eighteenth-century Andalusia to Paris during the revolutions of 1848. But these shifting settings obscure a more fundamental similarity. All of Townsend Warner\u2019s novels after<br \/>\nLolly Willowes<br \/>\nare historical fictions.<br \/>\nWhat\u2019s more, they often make same-sex love and desire an unquestioned part of their pasts. They are, in short, queer historical fictions\u2014albeit ones written before the genre had a name.<br \/>\nAt first glance,<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\nseems like an exception. The novel\u2019s protagonist is a man named John Barnard, and we follow his life from his birth in the small Norfolk village of Loseby until his death in 1863, at the height of the Victorian era. Along the way, Barnard marries, expands his business, and has several children.<br \/>\nIt\u2019s a novel, in other words, about a literal patriarch. But Townsend Warner hasn\u2019t come to praise the Victorians\u2014or even to bury them. She\u2019s here to queer them.<br \/>\nFive pages into the novel, while describing how attractive the young Barnard looks at his coming-of-age dinner, the narrator casually informs us that, \u201cAmong Loseby fishermen, it was taken for granted that men should feel amorously toward a handsome young man.\u201d<br \/>\nThe first time I encountered this sentence, I had to stop and reread it. It was so dazzlingly matter of fact, so calmly provocative. Sex between men was a crime in nineteenth-century England\u2014the historical record can tell us that\u2014but what traces does an unspoken assumption leave behind?<br \/>\nFrom its opening pages, then,<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\nimplies that England\u2019s past is much queerer than the historical record admits.<br \/>\nTownsend Warner soon expands on this idea through a subplot involving a handsome young schoolteacher named Thomas Kettle, who comes to Loseby to help his elderly aunt. On the day he arrives, though, Thomas spontaneously accepts an invitation to go night fishing with a group of fishermen who work for Barnard. Though he sends a local boy, Crusoe, to tell his aunt that he\u2019ll arrive later than expected, the message isn\u2019t delivered on time.<br \/>\nThis apparently minor incident sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to Thomas meeting Barnard and, eventually, marrying one of Barnard\u2019s daughters, Mary. Years pass. Unhappy in the marriage, and with the stodgy Barnard family, Thomas begins spending more and more time with the fishermen\u2014including a now grown-up Crusoe, who \u201cdance[s] attendance on [Thomas] like an affectionate bear.\u201d<br \/>\nAs a member of the gentry, Thomas is crossing class lines by cavorting with the fishermen who work for his father-in-law. The situation finally comes to a head when graffiti appears in the streets of Loseby, alleging that Thomas \u201cgoes with\u201d a fisherman named \u201cDandy Bilby.\u201d<br \/>\nOne of Mary\u2019s sisters spitefully translates it for her (and the reader): \u201cYou know what that means.<br \/>\nLoves<br \/>\n. That\u2019s what it means.\u201d<br \/>\nAt first\u2014in what feels like a winking allusion to the legend that Queen Victoria was unable to conceive of lesbianism\u2014Mary simply can\u2019t fathom the possibility.<br \/>\n\u201cBut they\u2019re both men, you silly girl!\u201d she tells her sister. \u201cMen can\u2019t love each other.\u201d<br \/>\nWhen finally convinced otherwise, she goes into shrieking hysterics. Any reader who feels similarly is thus put in the place of Mary: na\u00efve, then absurdly melodramatic.<br \/>\nBut Townsend Warner\u2019s takedown of prudish Victorian morality is only getting started. Although Thomas isn\u2019t in love with Dandy Bilby, he refuses to deny what his father-in-law calls (in High Victorian dudgeon) \u201cthis loathsome, this appalling accusation.\u201d Instead, Thomas uses it as an excuse to escape the Barnard family for good.<br \/>\nBefore leaving Loseby, however, Thomas tracks down the person who chalked the message onto the town\u2019s walls in the first place: Crusoe. (He realizes it\u2019s the younger man because his name is misspelled as \u201cTomas\u201d\u2014something Crusoe has done before.)<br \/>\nWhen Thomas asks Crusoe why he did it, the fisherman responds with what is, to my <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar baby allowance Philippines<\/a> mind, one of the most moving declarations of queer love in twentieth century English literature:<br \/>\nDo you see that there moon? There won\u2019t be a night of my life that I don\u2019t see that there old moon, but I\u2019ll think of you. For there\u2019s never been a handsomer, or a stunninger, nor a more remarkable, nor a dearer than you, and never will be. No one I shall love as I love you, be he rich or poor, he or she\u2026.<br \/>\nSoon as I clapped eyes on you I took a liking to you, no more than a boy then. Now I\u2019m a man grown, I love you. And I could go with plenty, and I go with some. But never as I\u2019d go with you. I\u2019d follow you round the world, if you\u2019d have me. I\u2019d give you the eyes out of my head, if you were to ask for them.<br \/>\nCrusoe goes on to explain that, though he was \u201cfair busting\u201d to tell Thomas about his feelings, he couldn\u2019t find the words. \u201cThere was no other way but to make you angry, so as you\u2019d leave off feeling as a gentleman. I had to get it out somehow, d\u2019you see?\u201d<br \/>\n\u201cRather to his own surprise,\u201d the narrator tells us, \u201cThomas did understand. Crusoe\u2019s declaration sounded neither classical nor reprehensible. So rang the long <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">discreet sugar dating Philippines<\/a> harsh sighs of waves embracing the shore, an elemental voice, alien and indisputable.\u201d<br \/>\nIt\u2019s another astonishing moment. By aligning Crusoe\u2019s declaration of love with the sea\u2019s \u201celemental voice,\u201d Townsend Warner insists on the naturalness of that love. She did this, moreover, in a time and place\u2014England in the early 1950s\u2014when queerness was seen as decidedly<br \/>\nun<br \/>\nnatural. As the scholar D. Wallace observes, when Townsend Warner was writing<br \/>\nThe<br \/>\nFlint Anchor<br \/>\n, the number of men being prosecuted for homosexual \u201coffenses\u201d was on the rise in England.<br \/>\nThomas\u2019s next words to Crusoe therefore refer as much to post-war England as they do to its Victorian past: \u201cFor a man to love a man is a crime in this country, Crusoe.\u201d<br \/>\nCrusoe\u2019s response is just as remarkable as his declaration of love.<br \/>\nNot in Loseby, Mr. Thomas, not in Loseby. Nor in any sea-going place, that I\u2019ve <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar daddy dating privacy<\/a> heard of. It\u2019s the way we live, and always have been, whatever it may be inland. I can\u2019t say for inland\u2026.But in Loseby we go man with man and man with woman, and nobody thinks the worse. Why, they darsn\u2019t even preach against it.<br \/>\nWith this passage, Townsend Warner expands on an idea she raised in an earlier novel,<br \/>\nAfter the Death of Don Juan<br \/>\n(1938). In that book, while discussing a rumored affair between a gentleman and a priest, one peasant woman tells another, \u201cThe gentlemen in the army are good Catholics, so they love the priests. It has always been so, it will always be so.\u201d<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\nextends this claim to the stuffiest-seeming era of English history. It insists that queer people have always existed\u2014even in the supposedly straitlaced nineteenth century\u2014and that to think otherwise is na\u00efve.<br \/>\nAfter reading the novel in manuscript, Townsend Warner\u2019s longtime publishers, Chatto &amp; Windus, told her that Crusoe\u2019s declaration of love would need to be cut. According to Harman, Townsend Warner was \u201cscornful when she heard this, and scornful of the firm\u2019s prim delay in telling her, and she refused to withdraw the passage. She did, however, agree to perform \u2018a little castration,\u2019 and sent the [typescript] back with a new paragraph to make the matter plainer.\u201d<br \/>\nChatto &amp; Windus should have known better. Townsend Warner\u2019s entire life had been built around queer love. She met her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland, at a tea party in 1927. At first, they didn\u2019t particularly like one another\u2014Townsend Warner later remembered that she talked too much, intimidated by the tall, handsome, and very quiet Ackland. Eventually, though, the two women became friends, then housemates.<br \/>\nOne night, while they were talking through the wall that separated their bedrooms, Ackland confessed that she sometimes felt \u201ccompletely unloved.\u201d Townsend Warner immediately went to her\u2014and from then on, they were lovers. They exchanged wedding rings after three months and, despite Ackland\u2019s many infidelities, remained together for the rest of their lives.<br \/>\nIn 1949, during a difficult period in their relationship, Townsend Warner wrote a letter to <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">pay per meet sugar dating<\/a> Ackland that reaffirmed their bond by retelling the story of their love.<br \/>\n\u201cFrom the moment you spoke from your side of the wall and I came in to you,\u201d she said, \u201cwe have been sure of each other, as sure as fish are of water, as birds are of air. We are each other\u2019s element.\u201d<br \/>\nFor Townsend Warner, then, there was nothing bloodless or academic about<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\n\u2019s depiction of queer love as elemental force. She had lived it.<br \/>\n*<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\ndoesn\u2019t end with Crusoe and Thomas sailing into the sunset together\u2014not even Townsend Warner could have gotten that past her publishers in 1954. Instead, she leaves the situation provocatively ambiguous.<br \/>\nCrusoe declares his love for Thomas just before the other man boards a ship bound for the Netherlands. Some months later, a letter for Mary arrives from Spain. Written by Thomas, allegedly on his deathbed, it bids her farewell forever, and encloses a death certificate signed by a doctor.<br \/>\nIt\u2019s heavily implied, however, that Thomas has simply faked his own death to get away from the Barnard family for good. Thomas\u2019s own father suspects the letter might be a \u201ctrick,\u201d but he ultimately decides not to investigate.<br \/>\nAnd then there\u2019s the letter\u2019s return address: M\u00e1laga, a port city on Spain\u2019s Costa del Sol.<br \/>\nOur last glimpse of Crusoe is equally <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar baby matching tips<\/a> suggestive. As Thomas boards the ship to the Netherlands, he\u2019s seen off by a rowdy crowd of fishermen.<br \/>\n\u201cAll of them but one,\u201d we\u2019re told, \u201cwatched the departing boat. Crusoe\u2019s face had tilted upward. He was looking at the moon.\u201d<br \/>\nWith this last detail, Townsend Warner invites us to imagine what she couldn\u2019t publish. To see the gentleman and the fisherman reunited in a \u201csea-going place\u201d where men openly love other men\u2014and always have.<br \/>\n*<br \/>\nToday, more than seventy years after it was first published,<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\nis\u2014unfortunately\u2014more relevant than ever. At a time of renewed persecution of queer and trans people, we need the novel\u2019s message that queer love is natural, ancient, and beautiful.<br \/>\nAnd we need, too, to recognize Sylvia Townsend Warner as a writer not only of marvelous <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar dating site Philippines<\/a> historical fiction, but of marvelous<br \/>\nqueer<br \/>\nhistorical fiction.<br \/>\nThe Flint Anchor<br \/>\nis, in fact, a bit less queer-centered than some of her other work.<br \/>\nIn her 1936 novel<br \/>\nSummer Will Show<br \/>\n, a wealthy English widow goes to Paris to track down her husband\u2019s mistress\u2014and promptly falls in love with her. In<br \/>\nMr. Fortune\u2019s Maggot<br \/>\n(1927), a missionary in nineteenth-century Polynesia becomes besotted with the young man he\u2019s trying to convert to Christianity. Even novels of hers that don\u2019t center queer relationships, like<br \/>\nAfter the Death of Don Juan<br \/>\n, still often calmly allude to queerness.<br \/>\nOddly enough, the very casualness with which Townsend Warner includes same-sex desire in her portraits of the past has, in a sense, worked against her. It\u2019s made it harder to see the queerness of her historical fictions.<br \/>\nOddly enough, the very casualness with which Townsend Warner includes same-sex desire in her portraits of the past has, in a sense, worked against her.<br \/>\nI\u2019m tempted, now, to say that her matter-of-fact treatment of queerness has also made it <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar baby scams Philippines<\/a> harder to see how \u201cahead of her time\u201d she was. But saying that would imply that the past was somehow inferior to our own historical moment\u2014less progressive, less accepting. As though there aren\u2019t many people today who, like Barnard the Victorian patriarch, think queerness is \u201cloathsome\u201d and \u201cappalling.\u201d<br \/>\nUltimately, saying Sylvia Townsend Warner was \u201cahead of her time\u201d would ignore one of the core messages of her fiction: the past is always queerer than we think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Queer historical fiction is having a moment. Acclaimed recent novels have imagined queer lives in settings as varied as Puritan New England, antebellum Mississippi, and England during the first World War. For LGBTQ+ readers, the genre\u2019s appeal isn\u2019t hard to sugar daddy vs sponsor understand. Reading queer historical fiction lets us imagine our way into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17,"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugargirl.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}