Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Corner that Held Them

Jim Hagan

"I never met a practising novelist who wasn't fascinated by it." - from the introduction in the version I read.

Countless faces emerge, define and melt back into the milieu. Like the Waxle stream the story continually flows and rapidly reforms itself in new directions year after quick year. Until... the sea, the sea!

Gabe Cortez

A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

The Corner that Held Them

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