Editor’s note: This untitled handwritten account by Warner of how she came to write The Corner That Held Them has not previously been published. It is roughly the same length as the notes on Mr Fortune’s Maggot and Summer Will Show that she sent to William Maxwell and that he included in his edition of Warner’s Letters (pp. 10–11, 39–40); Maxwell dates these to ‘the mid-1960s’. The manuscript is written on three pages of a lined exercise book and is not a fair copy.
Titles1 Isle Drury, Isle Drue, People Growing Old, Shadows on a river, the Corner that held them.
The 1st title and its variant remind me that in my first sight of The Corner the nunnery was a Somerset nunnery, and the river ran through Sedgemoor.2
The 3rd title is really the true one, for it was to this that I worked the story. Shadows etc, was brought to life by having to fill3 in a preliminary contract, and a glance back to another title I’d forgotten – Flat Country, which dates back to my 1st book of poems, and David Garnett dissuaded me from it in a letter of Mephistophelean4 concern about my sales. Pointed alps, he said, would sell, but not Flat Country.5 The final title was found by chance, because Valentine in 1948 filled the house with holy writs, and drew my attention to the Wisdom of Solomon left in the bathroom.6
The book began in 1941. I was in a doldrum. I had tried the beginning which remains as Hamlet in England,7 I had planned and begun a reconstruction of the first G.T.W. and the holy Townsends.8 The first bricks were the feeling of how white Ely must have looked across the 14th century fen, and how intimidatingly, tyrannically large, to the 14th century peasant, coming out of his smoky hovel to stare over the fen; and a wish to write Marxianly about the ages of faith.
The first piece of writing was a scene in the convent garden. Dame Alice was weeding shallots, a fat novice called Amy was helping her, and two nuns walked to and fro, talking about the convent’s finances and at one end of the walk looking through a gap in the reed fence onto the fen, and then turning to see the brand-new tower which had plunged them in debt. One of them was to become prioress; and to mislay her spirituality in the rough and tumble of administration, be neither Martha nor Mary, and hated for her incompetence. This nun split into Dame Alicia, and Dame Lilias. The Dame Alice of this date was discarded, because she showed every sign of being one of those homely herbal Anglocattish9 favourites. Her name and her housewifery went on to Dame Alice of the novel. There was also a tinge of the Corner’s Prioress Matilda in the haughty prioress of this period, who had been scolded by a bishop in visitation.
I think this was written before I sent to the L.L. for Eileen Power’s English Nunneries10 for re-reading. The next piece of writing was after. This was the arrival of the custos, then called Henry Fenscher, to quarrel with the bailiff and – then, violently, with the nun’s priest, Sir Ralph. The expedition to Esselby was in this draft, but minus the leper house and Ars Nova.11 A great deal of this draft12 (none of the other) went into the book: the Egyptian Day, the quarrel with the bailiff, the spire, and the departure on the morrow of S. Pancras day.13
So far the book was still intention, very clear, with no plan. But saying to myself I must begin it somewhere, I wrote the opening of Brian & Alianor straight off. This opening showed me that the manor must be moved into a harsher climate, and the Waxle stream is the Hundred Stream of Waxham Cobley.14 To find an East Anglian name for the nunnery was imperative, and I put this off till the book was in its third draught, for the imperative can safely be postponed. With the move to East Anglia it was natural to use John Powles for William Holly: and the innkeeping woman at West Somerton, Mrs Pitchers, gave me Mary Kettle. A little thought about architecture obliged me to change the original tower to a spire. This is the stage of People Growing Old: Sir Ralph settling down in his iniquity, Dame Alicia losing15 her élan about the spire, Dame Matilda aging in her sojourn as treasuress, Bishops dying (in this draught Bishop Giles died too), and the old Marie de Blakeborn at the christening. But one can’t have people growing old without the young coming up to push them off the scene.
Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive, Dorset History Centre; DHC reference number ‘D/TWA/A05’; previous reference number at the Dorset County Museum ‘STW.2012.125.1779’