Overview

T H White, author of the much-loved The Sword in The Stone, The Once and Future King, The Goshawk, and many other works of English literature, died in Greece from a heart attack in 1964, aged 57. When the eminent novelist and critic Sylvia Townsend Warner heard of his death she wrote in her diary: ‘T H White is dead, alas! – a friend I never managed to have.’ Warner was invited by White’s executors to write his biography. She visited his home in Alderney in the Channel Islands to see what material was available and felt that he followed her around in his house; ‘his angry, suspicious, furtive stare directed at my back, gone when I turned around’. When she finished his biography, nearly three years later, she wrote, ‘O Tim, I don’t like to lose you … it has been a strange love story between an old woman and a dead man’. T H White. A Biography was published in 1967 and was Warner’s greatest critical success since her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). It reveals White’s passions: for life, for learning, for all animals and birds, particularly hawks and dogs; his self-exile to Ireland during the Second World War, the creation of his tetralogy The Once and Future King, and the unexpected wealth and fame that came from The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon and the Broadway musical Camelot. Warner treats White’s repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet. White’s writing on falconry was the inspiration for Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed H is for Hawk.

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9781912766741

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Reviews

'A small masterpiece which may well be read long after the writings of its subject have been forgotten' (The New York Times, 1967)'By the highest standards this is a fine biography' (Times Literary Supplement, 1967) 'A splendidly intuitive appreciation' (Robert Nye, The Guardian, 1967) 'White's perfect biographer ... the portrait she draws ... is not only unmistakeably right, but one of the finest portraits of an artist in many years' (The New Yorker, 1968)

Author Information

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893. Her father, George Townsend Warner, was an history master at Harrow School, and Warner was educated first by her mother Eleanor and then her father. She had access to her father's considerable library as well as his expertise as a historian and as a teacher, and as a meticulous stylist in both writing and speech. This meant that she received an excellent education. She thus completely escaped formal educational disciplines and the influence of the state in determining what young people should learn and read. She excelled at music, and considered studying composition with Schopenhauer. In 1917 she was appointed to the editorial committee of the Tudor Church Music Project, on which she worked for twelve years. In 1925 she published her first collection of poems, and her first novel in 1926, Lolly Willowes, which became a Book of the Month in the US and has never been out of print. She continued to publish poetry alongside novels and short stories. Later in life, she also translated from the French, and in 1967 she published her biography of T H White. She met her lifetime companion Valentine Ackland in 1929, with whom she would live devotedly until Ackland's death in 1969. She had a distinguished career and was a highly respected literary figure, and her long collaboration with The New Yorker ensured some financial stability. She died in 1978, a year after the publication of her collection Kingdoms of Elfin, also published by Handheld Press. She lived in the village of Frome Vauchurch in Dorset.

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