The Corner That Held Them

Fiction & Literature, Religious, Contemporary Women
Cover of the book The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner, New York Review Books
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Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner ISBN: 9781681373881
Publisher: New York Review Books Publication: September 10, 2019
Imprint: NYRB Classics Language: English
Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
ISBN: 9781681373881
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publication: September 10, 2019
Imprint: NYRB Classics
Language: English

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.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

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.

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