[In the following review, Chisholm offers a favorable review of The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner.]

In 1929 Sylvia Townsend Warner described in her diary how she held a friend's baby on her lap. It felt, she wrote, ‘like a short stout salmon. It is not a person one feels moving when one holds a baby: it is life, compact, darting, incalculable.’ Some of her most characteristic and admirable qualities are instantly apparent: the unsentimental eye, the speed of perception, and the zest for life in all its oddity.

For all her brilliance, there was something elusive about her. Her life was full of discontinuities: at first a musicologist, she became a poet and novelist; her first love was a middle-aged man, but the love of her life was a younger woman; a deeply English writer, she was more esteemed in New York than in London; averse to self exposure and confessional writing, she left behind a huge intimate archive. Clare Harman, who has served Sylvia Townsend Warner well, first by editing her poetry and then by writing an exemplary biography, has now skillfully reduced 38 notebooks to a single volume, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was 34 and had just published her first, best-known novel, Lolly Willowes, when, in 1927, her friend David Garnett gave her a tempting new notebook, which prompted her to keep a diary. The plain, bespectacled, clever daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster, she came to be known as ‘the best boy at Harrow’. By the late 1920s, her adored father was dead, her pretty, selfish mother was happily remarried, and Sylvia was in the closing stages of a long, secret love affair with one of her father's married colleagues 22 years her senior. She was employed on a marathon project editing Tudor Church Music, and living alone in London.

To begin with, her diaries are reticent about feelings, though bursting with intellectual energy. ‘During the morning I thought about thought, and decided it would really be easier to believe in the Divinity of Christ than in twice two making four.’ She could have been a literary celebrity—Lolly Willowes, a novel about a modern witch, had been a huge success—but preferred to write a poem, go to a concert, or take a long solitary walk. She never drops names; when she meets one, she sees behind the mask. ‘Mrs Hardy (widow of the poet) like a very sad subdued seal, looking out of her face and then diving under again …’

She loved to celebrate the texture and small pleasures of daily life—the weather, landscape, cats. She struggles with her writing: ‘wrote like a verbose guinea pig.’ Writing, in fact, came easily to her; in 50 years she published over 30 books, novels, poetry and short stories. She contributed fiction to the New Yorker for 40 years and wrote the biography of T. H. White, but her first brilliant success was never quite repeated.

In 1931 her life changed irrevocably, and the diaries became the record of her emotional state. She had met Valentine Ackland, an enigmatic girl of 22 with literary aspirations, through the Powys clan in Dorset; at first wary, Sylvia then fell passionately and permanently in love. The sad young woman who had written, as her affair with her father's friend faded, ‘I have lost initiative to be happy’ becomes joyfully sensual, as she and Valentine shower each other with presents and celebrate anniversaries with truffles, oysters, and champagne. As she settles in a Dorset cottage, domestic and productive, content for the first time, Sylvia's diary becomes intermittent. ‘One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.’

It sounds too good to be true, and it was. For all the delight and liberation Valentine Ackland brought to Sylvia, she brought as much misery and oppression. Obsessed by her own inadequacy—her poetry rejected, her secret drinking a source of shame, Valentine regained self-esteem by undermining the woman who loved her. At the heart of the diaries is the record of the prolonged emotional crisis caused by Valentine's affair with an American woman, a memorable account of jealousy and pain. Sylvia remained constant, her relationship with Valentine survived and they lived in fragile tranquillity until Valentine's death from cancer in 1969.

Sylvia loved Valentine, but it is hard for the reader to like her. Not only did she devastate Sylvia emotionally, she also led her into an idiotic reverence for Stalin (both women joined the Communist Party in the 1930s) and cut her off from some of her oldest friends, David Garnett included. It is a relief to turn from the intensity of the diaries to the affection and humour of her correspondence with Garnett, selected by his son, in Sylvia and David.

They loved each other dearly, without a sexual interest, appreciated each other's writing, and in their last decade (Sylvia died, aged 85, in 1978) were exchanging jokes (‘While You Were Out Your Exterminator Called’—a New York leaflet relayed by Sylvia), recipes, references, tips on how to look after cats. According to Sylvia, sick cats thrive on brandy butter, and all cats must be stroked right to the tip of the tail. ‘Finish it with a flourish, as if it were the end of a violin concerto.’ If the diaries are a monument to the dark power of love, the letters testify to the enduring, consoling pleasures of friendship.