The Corner That Held Them

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Claire Harman (Introduction by)

$18.95

Adding to cart… The item has been added
Author
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Claire Harman (Introduction by)
Publish Date
2019-09-10
Book Type
Paperback
Publisher Name
NYRB Classics
Number of Pages
424
Edition
Reissue
ISBN-10
1681373874
ISBN-13
9781681373874
SKU
9781681373874

Description

A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.