Born December 6: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Through four decades of The New Yorker's glory era, the magazine published 150 short stories by the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, yet, as John Updike says, her work "never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved." Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1925), concerns a middle-aged woman who is not interested in men and instead becomes a witch. Her second novel, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927), concerns a middle-aged gay clergyman who while doing missionary work in the South Seas falls in love with a native young man and loses his faith. Lolly Willowes was the very first selection of the Book of the Month Club, and both novels were major successes in America and the United Kingdom. More novels, collections of stories, poems, and a biography of T.H. White followed, though at a slower pace and to smaller sales. NYRB Classics has finally reissued her 1936 lesbian novel Summer Will Show [Kindle] about a woman, Sophia, and her husband's mistress, Minna, who fall in love. Much has been made of Sylvia's literary friendship with her New Yorker editor (and author of the classic gay novel The Folded Leaf), William Maxwell, immortalized in a collection of their letters called The Element of Lavishness. Less discussed is her greatest love, her partner of 39 years, the poet Valentine Ackland. Although the two women died nine years apart, their ashes are buried together beneath a single stone in a churchyard in Chaldon Herring, Dorset.

For the National Portrait Gallery's landmark 2009 show Gay Icons, Sarah Waters selected Sylvia Townsend Warner.