The Corner That Held Them

Read for the Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week at A Gallimaufry. This was quite striking as an evocation of medieval life, with all its stinks, vermin and diseases, along with the persistent human doggedness that was needed to keep people going through all that. Lively and discursive as Chaucer's pilgrims, it's not at all a conventional narrative, leading the reader along a winding road that seemingly goes off into thin air at the end.

Strangely for a story centered around a convent, there was absolutely no sense of the immanence of God nor any striving after Christian love. The primary concern of nearly everyone is money, as they struggle along to keep the convent going, preserve their small luxuries, and keep the threatening and hungry poor at bay. Not a single nun is more than mildly inoffensive, or perhaps too stupid to offend, and most of them are quite unsavory characters, up to and including a murderess. Hers is not the only sin that is never discovered or punished; in this “holy” place, the temptations of the world seem to be hiding in plain sight. I'm not sure whether this is meant as an expression of Warner's own views against religion as an empty and hypocritical exercise, or as a portrayal of the kind of corruption in the religious life that led within a couple of centuries to the Reformation.

For me, it provided an interesting excursion, with often beautiful and highly original language, but I'm not sure what to think about the underlying message.