Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lesbian Communist Novel Summer Will Show

David Carroll Simon has a long essay in The Nation about Sylvia Townsend Warner's career, her forty-year partnership with Daily Worker subscriber Valetine Ackland, their joint conversion to Communism, and their similarities with the pair of Party members in her 1936 lesbian novel Summer Will Show, recently reissued by NYRB Classics. Abandoned by her cheating husband in the 1840s, Sophia Willoughby is left to raise their children in Dorset. After a tragedy, in 1848 she follows her husband to Paris and, after a chance meeting, Sophia and his mistress Minna fall in love just as the revolutionaries are erecting barricades. You can already sense the parallels between political and romantic radicalism. Simon writes that it is Minna's

"magnetism that draws Sophia toward the personal transformations that accompany the recognizably historical ones. Sophia's turn to radical politics coincides with the sudden onset of her love for Minna, and though Sophia's ideological commitment ultimately surpasses that of her lover, Warner ensures that these dimensions of Sophia's experience remain inseparable. As Sophia's intimacy with Minna deepens, so too does her investment in radicalism; Warner gives conviction the ache of lovesickness and passion the urgency of revolutionary violence."

Later he says:

"At the very center of the novel, just after Sophia and Minna's love has intensified into a kind of certainty, they embark on a surreal expedition--to the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, in the midst of revolutionary upheaval -- where Sophia apprehends suddenly, and without warning, that everything has changed irrevocably, and her life resembles none she had ever imagined for herself. Here Warner reminds us that the world's ordinary enchantment persists even under conditions of political chaos; the moments the pair experience in the Jardin are brief and porous, and shimmer with the transparency of a mirage. This diaphanous quality had long been Warner's signature, but now it is proof that the world can always be other than it is. Relaxing on a hillock with Minna, listening to the squawking of 'tropical birds' and to the 'roaring of lions,' Sophia ponders her happiness: 'Sitting here, and thus, she had attained to a state which she could never have desired, not even conceived. And being so unforeseen, so alien to her character and upbringing, her felicity had an absolute perfection; no comparison between the desired and the actual could tear holes in it, no ambition whisper, But this is not quite what you wanted, is it?' "