Mr. Fortune's Maggot (New York Review Classics) - Softcover

Warner, Sylvia Townsend

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0940322838 ISBN 13: 9780940322837

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2001

Synopsis

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 novella The 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 Maggot and its sequel are now available for the first time ever in one volume. They show Sylvia Townsend Warner at the height of her powers.

About this title

About the Author

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner’s biographer Claire Harman, it "was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda" to Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it "the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote." Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White.

Review

One can't be too thankful that Miss Townsend Warner has lived to discover the alchemist s' secret of transmuting the past and the possible, and even the impossible now and then, into pure gold―HILARY SPURLING, OBSERVER

One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers―HERMIONE LEE

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0940322838
• ISBN 13: 9780940322837
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256