I came across Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner thanks to the Literature Cambridge course this autumn. Ever since discovering her short stories some years ago I have been on the path of reading all of her novels, naively thinking the novelist will turn out to be equal to the short story writer. Fortunately or unfortunately, still can’t decide which, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was even wrong to even place the two sides of her writing in the same sphere. Her novels and her short stories don’t stand on equal footing, it’s more like they belong to different worlds. What unites the two worlds, though, and never fails to shine through her writing, is her irony and her witty contempt of how 20th century society was telling women how to live and behave, both privately and socially.

summer will show – sylvia townsend warner’s challenge to her readers

So far I’ve read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first and fourth novels. Lolly Willowes, her first novel, published in 1926, is a funny and uplifting story of rebellion and witchcraft set in the English countryside. It was when I first discovered that the author puts her women characters onto transformative journeys, both geographically and personally speaking, during which personal and social upheaval boil under the surface. Summer Will Show, published in 1936, takes the idea even further. Sophia Willoughby trades the safety of Blandamer, her aristocratic family home against adventure on the streets of 1848 Paris, a city marred by barricades and civil unrest. She is the wife and heiress who is transforming into a revolutionary fighting for herself and for her right to love.

I went head-first into the book, but I have to admit my enthusiasm was quickly curbed, since I was expecting to read a Sylvia Townsend Warner “long” short story or a darkly funny account of a woman’s path to change. As soon as I had read through the first page, I realized this is a book you need to spend time with. Straight from the beginning you are being thrown in Sophia’s mind, as she steps out of Blandamer with her children on a summer day of July 1847. Her mind moves between the present and the past moment, and, as a first-time reader, you can’t tell what is when, who is who, and where is when. A trip in the past to the Duke of Wellington almost takes place in parallel to a trip to the lime-kiln (you might need to look that up, as I did too). As a child, Sophia is to be introduced to the Duke, and as a mother, Sophia believes in the “system which had strengthened her childhood” and intends to strengthen the health of the children by having them breathe the airs of burning lime.

Needles to say, the beginning of Summer Will Show threw me back to Mrs Dalloway, the 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf, the beginning of which is also centered on a woman stepping out of her home while thinking back on her past. Townsend Warner’s novel continues much in the same modernist-like style, forcing the reader to keep her eyes and attention glued to the page, if she is to understand anything that’s happening. The first half of the novel interweaves different strands of time and relationships, shifting from the past (Sophia’s bond with her mother) to the present, marked by her children’s deaths and her emerging path toward the Paris of 1848.

between conventionality and rebellion

Sophia is for me a character I can’t quite decipher. She’s walking a narrow path between a traditional upbringing, which instilled in her conventional values such as marriage and children, and traces of rebellion against that which she was brought up to uphold. Sophia is practical, principled and somewhat rigid, seeing herself as the “queen” of Blandamer, her domain, and “doing as he [her father] would have done” in the matter of education of her children. She reveres her father, who approved the “compliance” in her, but she disapproves of her mother, who, after her father’s death, turned towards reading and nature, instead of “knitting and embroidering”, as would have been expected of her.

Mamma had approved her demeanour, Papa, philosophically, had approved her compliance; but there had never been, at any point of the Aspen triangle, the slightest yielding of heart to these whims of behaviour and feeling. Sophia might gaze at the moon as much as she thought fit; but she gazed at it through the drawing-room windows.

The changes Sophia will go through in Paris grow out of the fertile soil of her life at Blandamer. She sees marriage as a necessity for women of her class, without being particularly invested in it. She values life in nature more than she cares to admit. And when the revolution starts, it encounters a Sophia which is already open for it, without herself knowing it. The heart of Summer Will Show lies in how Sophia’s upbringing is steadily unravelled by new socialist values and political turmoil, but the ending of the novel does raise some doubts. Can rebellion last, in an age which is not favourable towards self-assertive women?

sophia and minna

The rest of the novel is quite different from its first part. Sophia is now in Paris and I don’t think it’s giving too much away by saying that she starts a romantic relationship with a woman. It’s really funny how Townsend Warner shapes the story in her specific ironic way: Sophia’s love interest is none other than her husband’s mistress, Minna Lemuel. Frederick, her husband, had abandoned Sophia and all but permanently moved to Paris, engaged in a relationship with charming Minna. The relationship is of course no secret and when Sophia turns up at a party at her rival’s house, intending to talk to Frederick, she is charmed.

At that moment the slowly flickering glance touched her, and rested. It showed no curiosity, only a kind of pondering attention. They, as though in compliance, Minna’s large supple hands gently caressed themselves together in the very gesture of her thought. Sophia started slightly. But answering Sophia’s infinitesimal start of surprise there had been a smile – small, meek, and satisfied, the smile of a dutiful child.

Sophia and Minna fall in love with each other, but it is Sophia who finds room to grow in this relationship. Minna’s social engagement and her passion for the revolution unravelling on the streets in front of her house light a fire in Sophia, who feels almost ashamed of her high social standing, and even of having more money than her friend. Sophia’s relationship with Minna defies the conventional “erotic triangle”. Frederick’s role as Sophia’s husband is marginalized, even ridiculed, and the true drama centers on the two women. Their intimacy is emotional, but also ideologically charged, intertwined with questions of class and race.

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The women in the novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner are never passive, and Summer Will Show is no exception. Sophia Willoughby, amid grief and abandonment, stands up against the limits of what 19^th century society allows for women. Her journey to Paris is both escape and confrontation: she seeks Frederick, but finds Minna, and a way to make herself anew. Through Sophia and Minna, Townsend Warner writes of freedom but doesn’t spare us from the ambiguity which it necessarily contains.