The Corner That Held Them [Paperback]

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.“[A]n exhilarating event, a radical work of fiction from seventy years ago which resonates sharply today.” —Tobias Carroll, BOMB

Warner’s style is delicate and arch . . . Though she teeters on the edge of satire, she lands instead . . . on poignancy. —Josephine Livingstone, The New York Times Book Review

One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power and beauty.  —Sarah Waters

“In The Corner That Held Them, [Warner] has observed and blended the nice trivialities, the emotional upsets and the occasional spiritual reflections of the some fourteenth-century nuns. . . . The form of the novel is outwardly as ramshackle as the convent l£+