This, arguably Sylvia Townsend Warner's most luminous collection of stories, was first published in 1966 and includes 'A Love Match', hailed by the "Los Angeles Times" as 'a supreme example of her technique.' It is the tale of Celia and Justin Tizard, sister and war-scarred brother, whose uncommon closeness becomes the talk of a small English village.

'Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most talented and well-respected British authors of the twentieth century. Today she is shamefully under-read. Her short stories have been particularly neglected - and yet, intelligent, lyrical, beautifully crafted, they constitute some of the very best of her work. It is wonderful to see so many of them being made available again by Faber Finds.' Sarah Waters

The original U.S. blurb says it well, '. . .But some readers consider her short stories the best vehicle for her impeccable craftsmanship, her peerless ability to sketch in a few deft lines a man or woman in a brief moment of destiny - tragic, comic, absurd or moving. These fourteen new stories are once again evidence of her wit and irony, her grace and poise.' A Spirit Rises comprises fourteen stories: Youth and the Lady; The Locum Tenens; The Fifth of November; A Question of Disposal; Barnby Robinson; In a Shaken House; The Old Nun; Randolph; On Living for Others; A Dressmaker; A Spirit Rises; The Snow Guest; During a Winter Night; A Work of Art. Many of the stories first appeared in The New Yorker which makes the dedication to William Maxwell all the more appropriate. A Spirit Rises is one of four collections of Sylvia Townsend Warner's short stories that Faber Finds are reissuing: Winter in the Air; A Spirit Rises; A Stranger with a Bag; Scenes of Childhood. 'Miss Townsend Warner, as always, comes up to scratch with the sheer caress of her style. The stories in A Spirit Rises, private, utterly leisured, are like charades played by angels - albeit rather sardonic ones, and in a slightly unreal hothouse. The choice and rhythm of her words are not to be wolfed; be patient, keep the mind free to wander on a quickening phrase or a squint of humour.' David Hughes, Sunday Times

This Christmas, 'hand yourself over to be enchanted' (Guardian) by the English genius behind witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes. 'Worth GBP9.99 for the book jacket alone (trust Faber) ... It's exquisite and shivery, just like the stories within ... By turns creepy, melancholy, horrifying, tragic and beltingly romantic.' Sunday Times 'One of our finest writers.' Neil Gaiman 'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.' Sarah Waters 'Diminutive masterpieces ... Hand yourself over to be enchanted.' Guardian 'Extraordinary, lucid wildness.' Helen MacDonald 'Glinting perfection' The Times Decades after her divorce, a lady returns to the village of her tumultuous marriage. A railway carriage hosts a charged schoolboy encounter. A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a cafe before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife. In these bittersweet tales, the author of Lolly Willowes reveals her mastery of the short story, celebrated by the New Yorker for decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a tragicomic chronicler of the heart's entanglements, from marriages and affairs to widowhood; and a champion of outsiders, whether single women, the elderly or wartime refugees. Witty and subversive, her stories meld tradition and transgression, with secret sins and fetishes as much a feature of English life as eccentric aunts, country houses and parish churches.

In this delightful and witty novel, Laura Willowes rebels against pressure to be the perfect 'maiden aunt'. Not interested in men or the rushed life of London, Laura is forced to move there from her beloved countryside after the death of her father. Her relatives like dead things; they treasure stuffed animals and parade possible husbands ('suitable and likely undertakers', as Laura calls them) in front of Miss Willowes. Finally, Laura strikes out for the countryside on her own, selling her soul to an affable but rather simple-minded devil, and becomes a witch. First written in the 1920s, this book is timely and entertaining. It was the first selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1926.

In the course of her brilliant career Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote superbly in many and diverse forms but never penned a memoir, properly speaking. However, from the 1930s to the 1970s she did contribute a series of short reminiscences to the "New Yorker." "Scenes of Childhood" collects and orders those reminiscences, thus forming a volume that reads as a joyous, wry and moving testament to the experience of being alive. The collection evokes a recognisably English world of nannies, butlers, pet podles, public schools, 'good works' and country churches, but the resonances of these stories are universal - funny and touching by turns.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling than family: witchcraft. 'The book I'll be pressing into people's hands forever is Lolly Willowes . . . Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness' Helen Macdonald

'A great shout of life and individuality ... an act of defiance that gladdens the soul' Guardian Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling than family: witchcraft. 'The book I'll be pressing into people's hands forever . . . It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favour of freedom ... tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness' Helen Macdonald 'Witty, eerie, tender ... her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it' John Updike

T H White, author of the much-loved The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died in Greece from a heart attack in 1964, aged 57. When the eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner heard of his death she wrote in her diary: ‘T H White is dead, alas! – a friend I never managed to have.’ Warner was invited by White’s executors to write his biography. She visited his home in Alderney in the Channel Islands to see what material was available and felt that he followed her around in his house; ‘his angry, suspicious, furtive stare directed at my back, gone when I turned around’. When she finished his biography, nearly three years later, she wrote, ‘O Tim, I don’t like to lose you … it has been a strange love story between an old woman and a dead man’. T H White. A Biography was published in 1967 and was Warner’s greatest critical success since her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). It reveals White’s passions: for life, for learning, for all animals and birds, particularly hawks and dogs; his self-exile to Ireland during the Second World War, the creation of his tetralogy The Once and Future King, and the unexpected wealth and fame that came from The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon and the Broadway musical Camelot. Warner treats White’s repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet. White’s writing on falconry was the inspiration for Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed H is for Hawk.

'One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power and beauty' Sarah Waters The nuns who enter a medieval Norfolk convent are told to renounce the world, but the world still finds ways to trouble them, whether it is through fire, floods, pestilence, a collapsing spire, jealous rivalries, a priest with a secret or a plague of caterpillars. As we follow their daily lives over three centuries, this masterpiece of historical fiction re-creates a world run by women. 'As an act of imagined history this novel has few rivals. Also, as it happens, a work of high, frequent comedy' George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement 'Spellbinding . . . One starts rereading as soon as one has reached the last page' Sunday Times 'Magnificent' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph

Sophia Willoughby, a young English woman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed off her unsatisfactory and improvident husband to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She will devote herself to the serious business of properly raising her two children. 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 Sophia has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband's sometime mistress. Minna leads Sophia on a wild adventure through Bohemian and revolutionary Paris. Sylvia Townsend Warner, was one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century English novelists as well as a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Summer Will Show is the most out-and-out exciting of Warner's novels and a brilliant re-imagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

'A comic masterpiece' Patrick Gale, Guardian Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story - his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes - over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner's last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously overturns our ideas of history, family and storytelling itself. 'A novel created with solidity and subtlety of feeling, a fusion of warmth, wit and quietly biting shrewdness that are reminiscent of Jane Austen' Atlantic Review 'As a sustained work of historical imagination, it has few rivals ... one of the most acute and intelligent writers of her age' Claire Harman

Endorsed by Neil Gaiman and Greer Gilman, this new edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner's final collection of short stories brings her fantasy writing to a new readership. Originally published in The New Yorker, and in book form in 1977 these sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom show Warner's consummate mastery of realist fantasy that recalls the success of her first novel, the witchcraft classic Lolly Willowes (1926). Warner explores the morals, domestic practices, politics and passions of the Kingdoms of Elfin by following their affairs with mortals, and their daring flights across the North Sea. The Kingdoms of Broceliande in France, Zuy in the Low Countries, Gedanken in Austria and Blokula in Lappland entertain Ambassadors, hunt with wolves and rear changelings for the courtiers' amusement. The fairy ruling classes are charming and insolent, and all levels of fairy society are heartless, in human terms. But love and hate strike at fairies of all ranks, as do poverty, abandonment and the passions of the heart. Enter Elfindom with care.

Following the success of Handheld Press's republication of Sylvia Townsend Warner's fantasy collection Kingdoms of Elfin, in October 2018, the remaining four Elfin stories are gathered together with the remarkable forgotten tales of The Cat's Cradle Book (1940). This is the last major fantasy collection by Warner to be republished for a new generation of fantasy enthusiasts and Warner fans. The twenty-three stories in Of Cats and Elfins encompass scholarship (Warner's ground-breaking essay from 1927 on modern Elfinology), black humour, the Gothic, and the bizarrely anthropomorphic cats of The Cat's Cradle Book, which enact Warner's preoccupation with the dark forces at large in Europe in the later 1930s. The Cat's Cradle opens with a story about the talking cats that die of a murrain in a manor based on Warner's own Norfolk home with Valentine Ackland. `The Castle of Carabas' continues the story begun in `Dick Whittington'. `The Magpie Charity' is a political fable satirising institutional charity, `The Phoenix' relates an unfortunate combustion in the bird collection of Lord Strawberry, and `Bluebeard's Daughter' narrates the adventures of Bluebeard's daughter by his third wife, and her propensity for locked doors. Warner mixes fables and myths with storytelling traditions old and new to express her unease with modern society, and its cruelties and injustices. Greer Gilman's Introduction studies the amalgamation of fantasy and political concern that produces Warner's most radical writing. Greer Gilman is the author of Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes, and two critically-acclaimed novellas about the poet Ben Jonson, as well as poetry and criticism. Her fantasy fiction, rooted in British myth and ritual, has won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards.

The first "Collected Poems" of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was published by Carcanet in 1982. Since then, more of her work has come to light, including some of the most moving and personal poems she ever wrote. Claire Harman, the original editor and author of the prize-winning biography of the poet, has substantially revised the earlier edition, including over ninety previously uncollected and unpublished poems, with expanded notes, a chronology and an authoritative new introduction. When Harman's Life was published, it restored Warner, one critic said, to her real place as 'second only to Virginia Woolf among the women writers of our century'. With this collection, the extent of Warner's achievement as a poet can be appreciated.

'The kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans ... her sympathies tended naturally to the marginal, the vulnerable, the exploited, the obscure' Sarah Waters Sukey Bond, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is sent to work as a servant at a farm on the remote Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with gentle, unworldly Eric, the son of the rector's wife, only for them to be separated when their relationship is discovered. But nothing will deter Sukey in her quest to be reunited with her true love, even if it means seeking the help of Queen Victoria herself. 'One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers' Hermione Lee 'One can't be too thankful that Miss Townsend Warner has lived to discover the alchemist's secret of transmuting the past into pure gold' Hilary Spurling

'A novel of love, war and death; brilliantly entertaining and far ahead of its time' Guardian 'She is my husband's mistress - and here am I, taking her out to dinner' Sophia Willoughby of Blandamer House, upstanding Victorian matriarch, has packed her errant husband off to Paris with his mistress Minna. But when tragedy throws her life off balance Sophia goes to seek him out, and instead finds herself intensely attracted to the charismatic, bohemian Minna, who leads her on a wild, chaotic adventure through a city in the throes of revolution. 'One of the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century. This is my favourite of her novels' Sarah Waters 'Every page contains something brilliant, arresting or amusing, and one comes away from it staggered' Claire Harman

'Witty, poetic, clairvoyant' John Updike The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank, has found his vocation: to convert the inhabitants of the remote tropical island of Fanua to Christianity. Even when everyone except for a young boy called Lueli remains indifferent to his preaching, Mr Fortune's good spirits cannot be dampened - until one day his faith is put to a terrible test. 'This quizzical tale is so intensely moving' Gillian Beer, New Statesman 'Original, elegant and hypnotically strange' Miranda Seymour, The New York Times 'Sylvia Townsend Warner pursues the psychology of the story with beautiful accuracy' John Carey

'She has a talent amounting to genius' John Updike Don Juan, that notorious libertine, has disappeared. Has he been dragged down to hell by demons, as rumoured - or has he escaped? Dona Ana, the woman he tried to seduce, will stop at nothing to discover the truth. Set in a rural eighteenth-century Spain rife with suspicion and cruelty, and featuring a glorious cast of peasants, aristocrats and vengeful ghosts, this moving, surprising tragicomedy is also Sylvia Townsend Warner's response to the dark days of the Spanish Civil War. 'The kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans' Sarah Waters

In "Lolly Willowes," Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family--a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

This is a new release of the original 1926 edition.