T H White, author of The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Book of Merlyn, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died at sea from a heart attack in 1964, aged 58. The eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner was asked to wrote his biography, the only study of his life, now republished for a new generation. The biography was published in 1967 and was Warner’s greatest critical success since her first novel, Lolly Willowes, in 1926. It reveals White’s passionate life, his determination to learn, his lifelong worship of hawks and dogs, his self-exile to Ireland during the Second World War, the creation of The Sword in the Stone, the first in the tetralogy The Once and Future King, and the unexpected wealth and fame that came with the Disney cartoon. Warner treats White’s repressed homosexuality and his sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet.
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Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893. Her father, George Townsend Warner, was an history master at Harrow School, and Warner was educated first by her mother Eleanor and then her father. She had access to her father’s considerable library as well as his expertise as a historian and as a teacher, and as a meticulous stylist in both writing and speech. This meant that she received an excellent education. She thus completely escaped formal educational disciplines and the influence of the state in determining what young people should learn and read. She excelled at music, and considered studying composition with Schopenhauer. In 1917 she was appointed to the editorial committee of the Tudor Church Music Project, on which she worked for twelve years. In 1925 she published her first collection of poems, and her first novel in 1926, Lolly Willowes, which became a Book of the Month in the US. She continued to publish poetry alongside novels and short stories. Later in life, she also translated from the French, and in 1967 she published her biography of T H White. She met her lifetime companion Valentine Ackland in 1929, with whom she would live devotedly until Ackland’s death in 1969. While Warner’s status as a literary figure may have been on the margins rather than at the centre, she maintained a distinguished career, and her long collaboration with The New Yorker ensured some financial stability. She died in 1978, a year after the publication of her collection Kingdoms of Elfin.
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