ABSTRACT
In Summer Will Show, the first novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote and published after having met and fallen in love with Valentine Ackland, the two female protagonists, Minna and Sophia, have their portrait painted. In examining the intensely textualised relationship between the two women, this book argues that Warner and Ackland's letters and diaries reveal complex negotiations between speech and silence, autonomy and influence, self-formation and the formation of the other. Their texts are accounts and acts of self-justification and myth-making as well as stories of love and friendship. The book reveals the extent to which life-writing texts can fulfil multiple functions in the lives of their authors. It suggests not only that the relationship found a form in their texts but that the texts had a role in forming the relationship. At times their writing became a substitute or proxy for the relationship, the only place where the other could be found; art, in these instances, replaced life.
