ABSTRACT
The English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner is celebrated and popular among nonacademic readers; but in spite of this and in spite of the fact that her novel Lolly Willowes (1928) is a feminist manifesto deserving a place in the curriculum no less than Virginia Woolfs texts, Warner has received virtually no attention in American studies of modem fiction. Yet her work is of great literary and theoretical interest. Her novels make plain the need for an approach to feminist-oriented fiction that sees such fiction in terms of a tradition in which some male writers are creatively implicated. Even more importantly, Warner's fiction represents a development in the English novel of a Marxist-oriented but Marxist-revisionist materialist analysis of history, in tandem with a radical challenge to realist traditions of representation, with which feminist and Marxist critics alike might well want to come to terms.
