Product Description

Sophia Willoughby, a young English woman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed off her unsatisfactory and improvident husband to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She will devote herself to the serious business of properly raising her two children. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long Sophia has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband sometime mistress. Minna leads Sophia on a wild adventure through Bohemian and revolutionary Paris. Sylvia Townsend Warner, was one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century English novelists as well as a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Summer Will Show is the most out-and-out exciting of Warner's novels and a brilliant re-imagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11453 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
Sylvia Townsend Warner has always possessed a cachet lifting her fantasies above mere prettiness and artifice...now she has produced a more imaginative work which begins with no indication of how it will end, and becomes by turns a period comedy of manners, a stylized comedy of temperaments and at last the drama of a woman's conversion to a new order of life...It is a very difficult thing to begin a book on a light and mocking note, make it gradually grow deeper and more resonant, and charge it finally with passionate sound; but Miss Warner has done it with unmistakable success. --The New York Times

Forget another adaption of 'Emma': I want to see this on Sunday night telly… It's a wildly leftist novel of love, war and death; Townsend Warner chucks the whole lot into her simmering story, but it remains skillfully crafted. Brilliantly entertaining and far ahead of its time, this is clearly way too hot for Sunday night drama to handle. --Guardian

As the denouement of Summer Will Show, where elegance burns into fervor, seems to me the most triumphal single moment in revolutionary fiction, so the whole elaborate, fine-spun novel seems the most skilful, the most surefooted, sensitive, witty piece of prose yet to have been colored by left-wing ideology. --Mary McCarthy, The Nation

About the Author
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music. Claire Harman's first book, a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson and edited works by Stevenson and Warner. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

Customer Reviews

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Revolutionary.AA
I am still surprised that I have discovered Sylvia Townsend Warner so late in my life. An amazing writer. She wrote "Summer Will Show" in the nineteen thirties and
some of its subject matter would have been unacceptable then. However, she wrote it
and succeeded in having it published. There is an extremely interesting account of
the French Revolution of 1848 and of Paris at that time.
The story tells us of certain events in the eighteen eighties that involved
Sophia Willoughby, a young aristocratic woman who has discovered that her husband is
having an affair with French mistress. She is the owner of the property and considerable land, having inherited it from her family. She therefor sends him away
to his mistress in France. Subsequent events cause her to travel to France to seek
him out.The Revolution begins almost as soon as she arrives. Being caught up in the
rioting, meeting her husbands mistress and finding herself unaccountably drawn to her, Sophia is trapped in Paris. The denouement is inevitable. I will not reveal any
of it. Sylvia Townsend Warner was certainly a revolutionary for the times she lived in.