A Past Most Queer: Remembering Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Radical Gay Historical Fiction

Queer historical fiction is having a moment. Acclaimed recent novels have imagined queer lives in settings as varied as Puritan New England, antebellum Mississippi, and England during the first World War.

For LGBTQ+ readers, the genre’s appeal isn’t hard to understand. Reading queer historical fiction lets us imagine our way into the gaps in the historical record—to undo our own erasure.

It’s ironic, then, that one of the twentieth century’s finest works of queer historical fiction has been almost entirely forgotten.

Published in 1954, The Flint Anchor is the final novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Best remembered today for her debut novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), Townsend Warner went on to write another six novels—as well as several volumes of poetry, nine collections of short stories, a translation of Proust, and a biography. (And that’s not even mentioning her letters.)

Critics often cite Townsend Warner’s remarkable range as the reason she isn’t better known today. As her biographer Claire Harman observes, her oeuvre lacks “the impression of coherence upon which a loud reputation depends.” Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics, makes a similar point. “Though utterly individual,” he says, “she never cultivated a trademark style or subject—each of her novels is different from the last.”

The settings of her novels certainly vary widely, taking place everywhere from a sleepy convent in medieval England to eighteenth-century Andalusia to Paris during the revolutions of 1848. But these shifting settings obscure a more fundamental similarity. All of Townsend Warner’s novels after Lolly Willowes are historical fictions.

What’s more, they often make same-sex love and desire an unquestioned part of their pasts. They are, in short, queer historical fictions—albeit ones written before the genre had a name.

At first glance, The Flint Anchor seems like an exception. The novel’s protagonist is a man named John Barnard, and we follow his life from his birth in the small Norfolk village of Loseby until his death in 1863, at the height of the Victorian era. Along the way, Barnard marries, expands his business, and has several children.

It’s a novel, in other words, about a literal patriarch. But Townsend Warner hasn’t come to praise the Victorians—or even to bury them. She’s here to queer them.

Five pages into the novel, while describing how attractive the young Barnard looks at his coming-of-age dinner, the narrator casually informs us that, “Among Loseby fishermen, it was taken for granted that men should feel amorously toward a handsome young man.”

The first time I encountered this sentence, I had to stop and reread it. It was so dazzlingly matter of fact, so calmly provocative. Sex between men was a crime in nineteenth-century England—the historical record can tell us that—but what traces does an unspoken assumption leave behind?

From its opening pages, then, The Flint Anchor implies that England’s past is much queerer than the historical record admits.

Townsend Warner soon expands on this idea through a subplot involving a handsome young schoolteacher named Thomas Kettle, who comes to Loseby to help his elderly aunt. On the day he arrives, though, Thomas spontaneously accepts an invitation to go night fishing with a group of fishermen who work for Barnard. Though he sends a local boy, Crusoe, to tell his aunt that he’ll arrive later than expected, the message isn’t delivered on time.

This apparently minor incident sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to Thomas meeting Barnard and, eventually, marrying one of Barnard’s daughters, Mary. Years pass. Unhappy in the marriage, and with the stodgy Barnard family, Thomas begins spending more and more time with the fishermen—including a now grown-up Crusoe, who “dance[s] attendance on [Thomas] like an affectionate bear.”

As a member of the gentry, Thomas is crossing class lines by cavorting with the fishermen who work for his father-in-law. The situation finally comes to a head when graffiti appears in the streets of Loseby, alleging that Thomas “goes with” a fisherman named “Dandy Bilby.”

One of Mary’s sisters spitefully translates it for her (and the reader): “You know what that means. Loves. That’s what it means.”

At first—in what feels like a winking allusion to the legend that Queen Victoria was unable to conceive of lesbianism—Mary simply can’t fathom the possibility.

“But they’re both men, you silly girl!” she tells her sister. “Men can’t love each other.”

When finally convinced otherwise, she goes into shrieking hysterics. Any reader who feels similarly is thus put in the place of Mary: naïve, then absurdly melodramatic.

But Townsend Warner’s takedown of prudish Victorian morality is only getting started. Although Thomas isn’t in love with Dandy Bilby, he refuses to deny what his father-in-law calls (in High Victorian dudgeon) “this loathsome, this appalling accusation.” Instead, Thomas uses it as an excuse to escape the Barnard family for good.

Before leaving Loseby, however, Thomas tracks down the person who chalked the message onto the town’s walls in the first place: Crusoe. (He realizes it’s the younger man because his name is misspelled as “Tomas”—something Crusoe has done before.)

When Thomas asks Crusoe why he did it, the fisherman responds with what is, to my mind, one of the most moving declarations of queer love in twentieth century English literature:

Do you see that there moon? There won’t be a night of my life that I don’t see that there old moon, but I’ll think of you. For there’s never been a handsomer, or a stunninger, nor a more remarkable, nor a dearer than you, and never will be. No one I shall love as I love you, be he rich or poor, he or she….

Soon as I clapped eyes on you I took a liking to you, no more than a boy then. Now I’m a man grown, I love you. And I could go with plenty, and I go with some. But never as I’d go with you. I’d follow you round the world, if you’d have me. I’d give you the eyes out of my head, if you were to ask for them.

Crusoe goes on to explain that, though he was “fair busting” to tell Thomas about his feelings, he couldn’t find the words. “There was no other way but to make you angry, so as you’d leave off feeling as a gentleman. I had to get it out somehow, d’you see?”

“Rather to his own surprise,” the narrator tells us, “Thomas did understand. Crusoe’s declaration sounded neither classical nor reprehensible. So rang the long harsh sighs of waves embracing the shore, an elemental voice, alien and indisputable.”

It’s another astonishing moment. By aligning Crusoe’s declaration of love with the sea’s “elemental voice,” Townsend Warner insists on the naturalness of that love. She did this, moreover, in a time and place—England in the early 1950s—when queerness was seen as decidedly unnatural. As the scholar D. Wallace observes, when Townsend Warner was writing The Flint Anchor, the number of men being prosecuted for homosexual “offenses” was on the rise in England.

Thomas’s next words to Crusoe therefore refer as much to post-war England as they do to its Victorian past: “For a man to love a man is a crime in this country, Crusoe.”

Crusoe’s response is just as remarkable as his declaration of love.

Not in Loseby, Mr. Thomas, not in Loseby. Nor in any sea-going place, that I’ve heard of. It’s the way we live, and always have been, whatever it may be inland. I can’t say for inland….But in Loseby we go man with man and man with woman, and nobody thinks the worse. Why, they darsn’t even preach against it.

With this passage, Townsend Warner expands on an idea she raised in an earlier novel, After the Death of Don Juan (1938). In that book, while discussing a rumored affair between a gentleman and a priest, one peasant woman tells another, “The gentlemen in the army are good Catholics, so they love the priests. It has always been so, it will always be so.”

The Flint Anchor extends this claim to the stuffiest-seeming era of English history. It insists that queer people have always existed—even in the supposedly straitlaced nineteenth century—and that to think otherwise is naïve.

After reading the novel in manuscript, Townsend Warner’s longtime publishers, Chatto & Windus, told her that Crusoe’s declaration of love would need to be cut. According to Harman, Townsend Warner was “scornful when she heard this, and scornful of the firm’s prim delay in telling her, and she refused to withdraw the passage. She did, however, agree to perform ‘a little castration,’ and sent the [typescript] back with a new paragraph to make the matter plainer.”

Chatto & Windus should have known better. Townsend Warner’s entire life had been built around queer love. She met her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland, at a tea party in 1927. At first, they didn’t particularly like one another—Townsend Warner later remembered that she talked too much, intimidated by the tall, handsome, and very quiet Ackland. Eventually, though, the two women became friends, then housemates.

One night, while they were talking through the wall that separated their bedrooms, Ackland confessed that she sometimes felt “completely unloved.” Townsend Warner immediately went to her—and from then on, they were lovers. They exchanged wedding rings after three months and, despite Ackland’s many infidelities, remained together for the rest of their lives.

In 1949, during a difficult period in their relationship, Townsend Warner wrote a letter to Ackland that reaffirmed their bond by retelling the story of their love.

“From the moment you spoke from your side of the wall and I came in to you,” she said, “we have been sure of each other, as sure as fish are of water, as birds are of air. We are each other’s element.”

For Townsend Warner, then, there was nothing bloodless or academic about The Flint Anchor’s depiction of queer love as elemental force. She had lived it.

*

The Flint Anchor doesn’t end with Crusoe and Thomas sailing into the sunset together—not even Townsend Warner could have gotten that past her publishers in 1954. Instead, she leaves the situation provocatively ambiguous.

Crusoe declares his love for Thomas just before the other man boards a ship bound for the Netherlands. Some months later, a letter for Mary arrives from Spain. Written by Thomas, allegedly on his deathbed, it bids her farewell forever, and encloses a death certificate signed by a doctor.

It’s heavily implied, however, that Thomas has simply faked his own death to get away from the Barnard family for good. Thomas’s own father suspects the letter might be a “trick,” but he ultimately decides not to investigate.

And then there’s the letter’s return address: Málaga, a port city on Spain’s Costa del Sol.

Our last glimpse of Crusoe is equally suggestive. As Thomas boards the ship to the Netherlands, he’s seen off by a rowdy crowd of fishermen.

“All of them but one,” we’re told, “watched the departing boat. Crusoe’s face had tilted upward. He was looking at the moon.”

With this last detail, Townsend Warner invites us to imagine what she couldn’t publish. To see the gentleman and the fisherman reunited in a “sea-going place” where men openly love other men—and always have.

*

Today, more than seventy years after it was first published, The Flint Anchor is—unfortunately—more relevant than ever. At a time of renewed persecution of queer and trans people, we need the novel’s message that queer love is natural, ancient, and beautiful.

And we need, too, to recognize Sylvia Townsend Warner as a writer not only of marvelous historical fiction, but of marvelous queer historical fiction. The Flint Anchor is, in fact, a bit less queer-centered than some of her other work.

In her 1936 novel Summer Will Show, a wealthy English widow goes to Paris to track down her husband’s mistress—and promptly falls in love with her. In Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927), a missionary in nineteenth-century Polynesia becomes besotted with the young man he’s trying to convert to Christianity. Even novels of hers that don’t center queer relationships, like After the Death of Don Juan, still often calmly allude to queerness.

Oddly enough, the very casualness with which Townsend Warner includes same-sex desire in her portraits of the past has, in a sense, worked against her. It’s made it harder to see the queerness of her historical fictions.

I’m tempted, now, to say that her matter-of-fact treatment of queerness has also made it harder to see how “ahead of her time” she was. But saying that would imply that the past was somehow inferior to our own historical moment—less progressive, less accepting. As though there aren’t many people today who, like Barnard the Victorian patriarch, think queerness is “loathsome” and “appalling.”

Ultimately, saying Sylvia Townsend Warner was “ahead of her time” would ignore one of the core messages of her fiction: the past is always queerer than we think.