Mister Fortune's Maggot

Mister Fortune's Maggot PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 9780860680437
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey Branch of Lloyds Bank, has spent ten years as a South Seas Island missionary when a 'maggot' impels him to embark on what he describes as a 'sort of pious escapade' - an assignment to the even more remote island of Fanua, where a white man is a rarity. Mr Fortune is a good man, humble, earnest - he wishes to bring the joys of Christianity to the innocent heathen. But in his three years on Fanua he makes only one convert - the boy Lueli, who loves him. This love, and the sensuous freedom of the islanders produces in Mr Fortune a change of heart which is shattering... Beautifully imagined, the paradise island and its people are as vivid as a Gauguin painting. Told with the driest of wise humour, touching and droll by turns, its theme - that we can never love anything without messing it about - is only one of the delights of this enchanting book.

Mr. Fortune's Maggot

Mr. Fortune's Maggot PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Viking Press 1927.
ISBN:
Category : Boys
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book

Book Description
A second meaning to the word 'maggot' is 'a whimsical or perverse fantasy' and it is a maggot of this variety that takes the Reverand Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey Branch of Lloyds Bank, to the remote South Sea island of Fanua as a missionary. This 'pious escapade' brings him the joy of being let loose into the world for the first time.

Mister Fortune's Maggot

Mister Fortune's Maggot PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 9780860680437
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey Branch of Lloyds Bank, has spent ten years as a South Seas Island missionary when a 'maggot' impels him to embark on what he describes as a 'sort of pious escapade' - an assignment to the even more remote island of Fanua, where a white man is a rarity. Mr Fortune is a good man, humble, earnest - he wishes to bring the joys of Christianity to the innocent heathen. But in his three years on Fanua he makes only one convert - the boy Lueli, who loves him. This love, and the sensuous freedom of the islanders produces in Mr Fortune a change of heart which is shattering... Beautifully imagined, the paradise island and its people are as vivid as a Gauguin painting. Told with the driest of wise humour, touching and droll by turns, its theme - that we can never love anything without messing it about - is only one of the delights of this enchanting book.

Mr. Fortune's Maggot

Mr. Fortune's Maggot PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9780940322837
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune lights out for Fanua. Yet after three years, he has made only one convert, and his devotion to the boy may prove more sensual than sacred.Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s second novel, is lyrical, droll, and deeply affecting, and her missionary captivated his creator as much as he did her readers. Long after the book's publication, Warner began the novellaThe Salutation. Now adrift and starving on the Brazilian pampas, Mr. Fortune is rescued by an elderly widow, who delights in having an Englishman about the house. Her heir, however, may beg to differ. Brilliant and subversive,Mr. Fortune's Maggotand its sequel are now available for the first time ever in one volume. They show Sylvia Townsend Warner at the height of her powers.

Lolly Willowes

Lolly Willowes PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
In this delightful and witty novel, Laura Willowes rebels against pressure to be the perfect 'maiden aunt'. Not interested in men or the rushed life of London, Laura is forced to move there from her beloved countryside after the death of her father. Her relatives like dead things; they treasure stuffed animals and parade possible husbands ('suitable and likely undertakers', as Laura calls them) in front of Miss Willowes. Finally, Laura strikes out for the countryside on her own, selling her soul to an affable but rather simple-minded devil, and becomes a witch. First written in the 1920s, this book is timely and entertaining. It was the first selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1926.

Summer Will Show

Summer Will Show PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174062
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book

Book Description
In revolutionary Paris, a disaffected Victorian wife becomes enraptured by her husband’s mistress—a “brilliantly entertaining” historical fiction novel that was “far ahead of its time” (Guardian). “One of the great under-read British novelists of the 20th century . . . my favorite of her novels.” —Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. 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 she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades. Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

The Corner That Held Them

The Corner That Held Them PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373882
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Mr Fortune's Maggot

Mr Fortune's Maggot PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0241476097
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
'Witty, poetic, clairvoyant' John Updike The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-clerk of the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank, has found his vocation: to convert the inhabitants of the remote tropical island of Fanua to Christianity. Even when everyone except for a young boy called Lueli remains indifferent to his preaching, Mr Fortune's good spirits cannot be dampened - until one day his faith is put to a terrible test. 'This quizzical tale is so intensely moving' Gillian Beer, New Statesman 'Original, elegant and hypnotically strange' Miranda Seymour, The New York Times 'Sylvia Townsend Warner pursues the psychology of the story with beautiful accuracy' John Carey

A Meaningful Life

A Meaningful Life PDF Author: L.J. Davis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590173945
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.

Letters Of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Letters Of Sylvia Townsend Warner PDF Author: S Warner
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448189969
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book

Book Description
Very early in her career Sylvia Townsend Warner won recognition of a discerning group of writers and readers on both sides of rare imagination and originality increased with each new publication. In addition to publishing some twenty books she wrote thousands of letters, mainly to close friends and acquaintances, and these quite naturally provide a record of almost fifty years of the writer’s life. As the editor of the selection says, she had a connoisseur’s eye for the bogus and a hatred for assumptions of privilege – her heart was with the hunted, always, and her deep understanding of human behaviour makes the whole a remarkably compassionate volume. Her interests are wide-ranging, and we read of the pleasures of travel, Proust’s shortcomings as a literary critic, current politics, Rupert Brooke at the Café Royal, an eccentric moorhen, the Spanish Civil War. Above all, apart from their intrinsic interest and literary quality, Miss Warner’s letters reveal the special brand of wit and humour that pervades every word she writes.

Kingdoms of Elfin

Kingdoms of Elfin PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: Handheld Classics
ISBN: 9781999944810
Category : Fairies
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book

Book Description
Sylvia Townsend Warner's final collection of short stories contains sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom.