Category Archives: The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society

Join the team behind the Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society for a two-day in-person conference celebrating the centenary of Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first and best-known novel.

First published in 1926, Lolly Willowes explores themes of freedom, gender, and religion in a distinctive and thought-provoking way. As a serious and imaginative fantasy, it stands as a strikingly original contribution to literary modernism, written in the same decade as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. This conference places Warner’s novel at the centre of that landscape and opens up new perspectives on its significance and enduring relevance.

Organised in collaboration with the UCL English Department, UCL Press, and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the conference features a keynote lecture by the novelist Adam Mars-Jones. The programme also brings together poets and fiction writers Philip Hensher, Juliet McKenna, and Deryn Rees-Jones, alongside the American composer Michael Alec Rose, who will present excerpts from his 2019 chamber opera Lolly Willowes.

• Event type: In person
• Date & time: 29 May 2026 – 30 May 2026
• Location: IAS Common Ground, Room G11 South Wing, University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom

Day tickets are available to purchase for either individual days or the whole conference. 

Find out more and book your place:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanities/events/2026/may/lolly-willowes-100-sylvia-townsend-warner-rel…

UCL Press is pleased to announce that the latest volume of The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, volume 24 (2024), has published with alt text in the html and PDFs for all images.

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is a peer reviewed, open access journal, aiming to create a wider interest in the life and works of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Scholarly articles and pieces by well-known contemporary writers describing their appreciation of Warner are published alongside previously unpublished archival works by Warner, with each volume boasting an impressive list of figures which are mostly reproduced with permission from the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Archive at the Dorset History Centre, but occasionally seen for the first time through the journal.

In the current volume, readers can see candid pictures of Sylvia Townsend Warner, taken by her partner Valentine Ackland, alongside typescript notes of Warner’s manuscripts, and Warner’s handwritten correspondence to author Thomas Hardy.

The inclusion of alt text enables assistive technologies to read a description of these images aloud to the reader who cannot see them. This means the journal will be able to reach a wider audience and ensures equal access for all. First piloted in a Research For All article, this marks the first full volume of a UCL Press publication to publish with alt-text.

The current volume of The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society also features the Society’s 2023 biennial lecture, ‘‘The True Voice of the Heart’: Capture and Evasiveness in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Life and Work’. The Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture series is a biennial event run by the journal and supported by UCL Press. The series offers the opportunity to hear from acclaimed writers whose work touches on Warner’s life and works. The 2023 lecture was delivered by Claire Harman, who is an award-winning writer and critic known for her pioneering work on Sylvia Townsend Warner.

About the UCL Press journals programme

A version of this article appeared on the journal’s blog.

UCL Press are proud to publish 15 Open Access journals, that cover a broad range of topics across the humanities, law, and social sciences, as well as science, technology, and engineering. We are also home to UCL Open Environment, the first and only dedicated, multidisciplinary, Open Science journal that publishes broadly across all environment related subjects. Explore our journals at journals.uclpress.co.uk

On the anniversary of her birth, the UCL Press journals team reflects on the life and works of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Born on 6^th December 1893, Warner was an English novelist and poet. In 1925 Warner published her first collection of poetry, The Espalier and her first novel, Lolly Willowes, published the following year, establishing her as a literary talent, a contemporary of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Warner contributed short stories to the New Yorker for more than forty years and went on to write six more novels.

Warner lived in Dorset for most of her life with her partner, Valentine Ackland. They joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and worked in Spain during the Civil War and her writing at the time reflected on contemporary politics.

Warner continued publishing throughout her life, subverting dominant narratives on gender, sexuality and politics. Though interest in her work remained steady during her lifetime, the attention her work has gained in the years following her death in 1978 has brought renewed enthusiasm and new readers to her work.

In this context, The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society was launched in 2000 with the aim to promote a wide readership and better understanding of the writings of Warner. The society also launched a new academic journal, The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, edited by Professor Peter Swaab (UCL English, University College London, UK). Published by UCL Press, The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is a peer reviewed, open access journal, aiming to create a wider interest in the life and works of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Scholarly articles and pieces by well-known contemporary writers describing their appreciation of Warner are published alongside previously unpublished archival works by Warner.

In addition to the journal, the society, with the support of UCL Press, host a bi-annual lecture offering the opportunity to hear from acclaimed writers whose work touches on Warner’s life and works. The previous four Sylvia Townsend Warner Lectures were given by Maud Ellmann (2017), Peter Swaab (2019), David Trotter (2021) and Claire Harman (2023). All essays are published by UCL Press in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society and are freely available online as open access publications. Lectures are also recorded and can be freely streamed online from the journal site, here.

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About the author

This post originally appeared on the blog of The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. The original post can be read on their site.