Sylvia Townsend Warner, The True Heart (1929

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When I met Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner at lunch recently she told me she was one the few British writers who had come to the U.S.A. with the firm resolve never to make speech, give a lecture, or be photographed or interviewed. As her book, “True Heart,” is just due here, however, she may be induced to change her mind.

‘A New York Letter,’ Yorkshire Post, February 25, 1929

It is not easy to describe the quality of Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel THE TRUE HEART (Chatto and Windus, 7s. 6d., net). Though it tells of a simple servant-girls love for an epileptic boy and of the steadfast devotion with which she follows him until she can take him under her wing and marry him, and although the date is from 1873 onwards, the descriptions of Essex landscape are brilliantly real, the episodes of Sukey’s pilgrimage are not at all impossible, and the great climax is an interview with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace – all these circumstantial details are not much more than the material colours in which Miss Warner has painted an ethereal theme. To express its quality one would have to compare this story to an illumination, to some old Italian series picture of the life of Griselda, or to the figures on a Flemish tapestry. Though the author does not shrink from the ugly and the violent, she takes Sukey into the parlour of Mrs Oxey, the procuress, she lets Mr Mullein be gored by a bull – this very charming tale does not belong to the actual world at all, but to the everimagined youth of the world when a true and innocent heart could go unscathed through every danger, unspoiled by any contact, to find it’s love at the last.

Sukey Bond, the soul of obedience, a girl of perfect innocence, is taken from an orphanage to be girl upon a lonely farm in the Essex Marches; and here, among the rough Norman family, she finds her love, Eric Seaborn, son of the rector of Southend, whose existence has always been concealed from the world by his proud, ambitious mother. The ethereal union of these two is very beautifully depicted –and a deal of two innocence in a deserted orchard. They kiss and that is all. Sukey “might as well try to lean on a rainbow” as put any trust in Eric. Yet, ignorant as she is, so simple that she believes herself to be with child while yet intact, so trusting that she pursues Eric to the rectory and hopefully reveals herself to the outraged rector’s wife as the expectant mother of her grandchild, her love brings her to womanhood. The succession of scenes is like a story from Boccaccio depicted on an arras; Sukey befriended by the tramp. Sukey’s innocence protecting her from contamination that Mrs Oxey’s. Sukey tending the Mullein children at Halfacres farm and daily revering the picture of Queen Victoria presenting the Bible to a

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kneeling negro, Sukey hearing of the slight put upon Mrs Seaborn by a Princess in public and determining to win Eric by turning away the Royal Family’s wrath against his mother, Sukey driving in the vegetable-wagon to Covent Garden, Sukey given tea by Lord Constantine Melhuish, Sukey in the presence of the great Queen, Sukey and Eric hiding from Mrs Seaborn under a hedge, and, finally, Sukey married and a mother country go up all the past memories of her maiden life. Though Sukey is too good to be true, there is nothing grotesque about her; for Miss Warner is a poet at heart who draws no hard line between the imagined and the real, and can therefore blend both with perfect grace.

Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 1929

Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner adopts, by way of contrast [to the previous review, of a book by Hugh Walpole and JB Priestley], the post war convention. It is, of course, really a war convention, for are not the bravest men in our war novels shot for desertion, and is there in all their pages, except in a few books, a professional soldier who fights? And so in this novel the only thing noticed about the only gentleman who appears in the book is “his large white gentleman's hands,” and the “true heart” belongs to a servant girl who falls in love with an idiot.

Some stage parsons, an elegant “lady” with a past and no heart and a keeper of a disorderly house with a heart of gold, flit across the bemused vision of Miss Sukie [Sukey] Bond, who after some painfully realistic adventures meets a real lord at Covent Garden, sees the Queen (Victoria) and goes back to marry the idiot.

What would Dean Inge say about

it?

Sukie Bond is an attractive study in muddle-headed innocence but the unfailing perversity of the rest of the character drawing is not justifiable in a fairy story.

You must not throw stones from dreamland and expect them to hit the mark.

Douglas Jerrold, Britannia and Eve, March 8, 1929

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BOOK OF THE DAY

There are few novelists of the day whose use of words can compare with the delicate and yet pungent prose of Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner, For certain people a new book by her is the literary event of the year. Many readers whose admiration does not extend quite as far as that, settle down to her latest work with a rare anticipation of aesthetic enjoyment. Others again, and the present reviewer is among them, find her as exasperating as she is seductive; and embark on each new book with a suspicion that seems likely to become a certainty, as time goes on, that they will be at first delighted, and then (it seems to them) unjustifiably let down. It is as if the author, like one of her own half-witches, took malicious pleasure in luring the reader on, by the rightness and beauty of her setting, and by her penetration and illumination of character, to expect passionate human climax; and then, all of a sudden, freakishly twitched up the curtain for the last act on a show of marionettes.

“The True Heart” is the story of Sukey Bond, who left the Warburton Memorial Female Orphanage to take a place as servant on an isolated farm on the marshes beyond Southend. She had given every satisfaction as an orphan.

“Prize for good conduct,” Mr. Warburton read out, “awarded to Sukey Bond. A copy of Bunyan’s ‘Holy Man.’ With illustrations. I see. Sukey Bond, I have great pleasure in presenting you with the prize for good conduct. Er—conduct is everything.”

So the situation on the Marshes was found for her by the beautiful Mrs. Seaborn, distinguished patroness of the Orphanage, and a relative of Mr. Warburton. In due course her new employer called for her, and in due course, after a long drive, he brings her to her new home. Pointing with his whip the farmer said; “There are the Marshes.”

They had reached the brow of little rise, and before them the fields sloped downward and away to rich-coloured flats, streaked and dotted with glittering water. Here and there were farmsteads, and a few groups of dwarfish trees showed up black and assertive, at odds with the solitude. Not a shadow fell on the marsh from the cloudless sky, nothing moved there; even the cattle were still, clustered round the trees for shade. It lay in unstirring animation, stretched out like the bright pelt of some wild animal. To the eastward a dark rim bounded it, and beyond this was further expanse that shone, baffling the eye.

On the farm, where there is no woman to keep a friendly eye on Sukey, a boy, who has some inexplicable, elusive quality which separates him from the farmers’ sons, is being brought up with them. Very young, and completely innocent, Sukey Bond loves him at

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once, instinctively. He is drawn to her too, by instinct; but even Sukey cannot remain blind to this strange, elusive quality, this “difference,” in her young lover: “a lover who for an hour was near and close, and the hour after was more strange than any stranger; a lover who seemed able to forget her words and kisses as utterly as though they were a dream lost in awakening.” Actually, he is the secret son of Mrs. Seaborn, the Orphanage’s distinguished patroness; an epileptic, boarded out with the farmer, a decent man, who has undertaken to look after him and keep him out of his mother's way. The boy is physically normal, and possessed, as many epileptics are, of a pure and almost unearthly beauty of feature and form; the disquieting, unmistakable beauty of one “lightly tethered to reality.” The girl feels his strangeness, conveyed with an exquisite apprehension of its significance to Miss Warner; and is baffled by his inexplicable periods of unconcern and complete forgetfulness; but is entranced by his essential kindness. She had forgotten everything except this new pleasure being cherished. With a sigh she drew him to sit down beside her and offered her mouth to be kissed. Above his face, shadowy and strange with proximity, and the near bright glitter of his eyes, she saw the pattern of oval leaves; like a sweet net it seemed to descend on her and close her in.

All the ingredients of tragedy are in this love story of two elemental beings. But at this point Miss Townsend Warner breaks off and careers away into fantasy, as usual. The farm life comes to an abrupt end; an epileptic attack of the boy’s has revealed the secret of his elusive quality to Sukey; he is sent home; and she sets forth to try and obtain an audience with Queen Victoria, whose intervention with Miss Seaborn will enable her, she believes, to marry and take care of him. Even the fantasy is well done. But another real theme has been wasted.

Yorkshire Post, March 2, 1929

The author of Lolly Willowes walks apart, seeing the world for herself, using the common words of the dictionary as though she herself had just invented them . . . She is very quiet, very reserved, but none the less excited and exciting. The True Heart is like no other book I have ever read. This doesn't mean that it is henceforth my favourite novel, but it does mean that I shall never forget it. It is, outwardly, the story of an orphan servant girl. Twenty-five years ago people used to class novels as “pretty” or otherwise. (Perhaps they still do, those people.) Miss Warner's story is “pretty,” and yet how different! This is a mixture of realism and phantasy.

The humble heroine of The True Heart might be cited to illustrate the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount. She is meek, and she becomes the

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friend and confidant of the patron of the Orphanage and marries the son of a clergyman. She is pure in heart, and she sees and speaks with Queen Victoria. Does this sound sentimental and ridiculous? There is a bloom on the little story which makes it no more and no less sentimental and ridiculous than a rose.

The Sphere, March 9, 1929

Some people make a living by distilling those fine fresh country smells which are to be met in an April wood or a June meadow, and sealing them up in fantastic cut-glass bottles, and giving them French names, and advertising them as “liquid sun shine,” or “the perfume of remembered laughter,” and selling them at high prices to rich women.

All the time I was reading Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner's The True Heart, one corner of my mind was seeing such a small flask, set, solus and priceless, in a Rue de la Paix window its very solitude proclaiming “I am exquisite and expensive I am an essence of beauty, prisoned in crystal, and only to be released by much fine gold.” And when I tried to sweep the little bottle out of my mind and could not, I realised that its name was The True Heart and its manufacturer Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner. To be more explicit, Miss Warner's writings are largely composed of descriptions of natural things; yet they are essentially artificial. They describe emotions, thoughts, loves, which should be common to mankind but they have been distilled and refined, and poured into little bottles marked “exclusive.”

You are to feel, please, that in appreciating the sweet, simple joy of Sukey in love, you have proved yourself a judge of the exquisite, and are somehow raised thereby above the common run of novel readers.

So, if you like your beauty in a bottle at so much an ounce, here's the very thing for you. It is exquisite; do not mistake me; as soon as you open the book you “shake hands with delectable odours.”

The Graphic, March 23, 1929

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It might almost be imagined that Miss Warner had set herself a problem in the virtuosity of her art in taking as her heroine a girl from an orphanage, in the early ‘seventies of last century. Sukey Bond, indeed, has bettered the instruction of the orphanage by being a model of characterless docility and industry. So thoroughly has she conformed to the rule and teaching of the institution in which she has been reared that she is a show pupil, almost conspicuous, to venture upon a paradox, in her absence of individuality. But behind the meek exterior of the well-drilled girl whose destiny is domestic service, there is a mind which works vaguely, but none the less inquiringly, although its possessor is half-alarmed at the idea of its daring to work at all. She is placed in service at a farm in the Essex Marshes, and there encounters Eric Seaborn, the mild and almost childish son of an ambitious mother, to whose pride his departure from the normal is a scourge. Sukey and Eric, indeed, are a pair of children, and in telling their story Miss Warner deserts fact for fantasy. It is, however, fantasy of a true poetic cast, and Sukey, wandering unscathed through a series of remarkable adventures, ranging from protection by a kindly tramp when she is destitute to an interview with Queen Victoria, is a curious mixture of the soberly real and the elfin. The same thing might be said of the book as a whole. It never remains for long quite steadily on one piano. Everything is at once real and unreal. The effect, however, is fascinating.

The Scotsman, May 13, 1929

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From The Nature of the Moment by Valentine Ackland

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