{"product_id":"summer-will-show-isbn-9781590173169","title":"Summer Will Show","description":"Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. \u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003eThen tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades.\u003cbr\u003e       \u003cbr\u003eSylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, \u003ci\u003eSummer Will Show\u003c\/i\u003e is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.“It's a wildly leftist novel of love, war and death; Townsend Warner chucks the lot into her simmering story, but it remains skilfully crafted. Brilliantly entertaining and far ahead of its time.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sophia Willoughby leaves her disloyal husband. Both of her young children die of smallpox. Sophia flees to Paris, where she enters a relationship with her husband's mistress, a woman raised in czarist Russia. It is 1848, and Sophia finds herself caught in the revolutionary crossfire. It is a long, hard fall from the landed gentry of her native England to the bloody streets across the Channel...Anxiety, harsh, impossible choices and the fugitive life -- these are Warner's stations of the cross.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As the denouement of \u003ci\u003eSummer Will Show\u003c\/i\u003e, where elegance burns into fervor, seems to me the most triumphal single moment in revolutionary fiction, so the whole elaborate, fine-spun novel seems the most skilful, the most surefooted, sensitive, witty piece of prose yet to have been colored by left-wing ideology.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Mary McCarthy, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sylvia Townsend Warner has always possessed a cachet lifting her fantasies above mere prettiness and artifice...now she has produced a more imaginative work which begins with no indication of how it will end, and becomes by turns a period comedy of manners, a stylized comedy of temperaments and at last the drama of a woman's conversion to a new order of life...It is a very difficult thing to begin a book on a light and mocking note, make it gradually grow deeper and more resonant, and charge it finally with passionate sound; but Miss Warner has done it with unmistakable success.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book is indeed a woman’s handiwork, with a woman’s insight, malice, exquisiteness; in its wit, its instinct for style, its drawing-room urbanities, it will suggest at one time or another the work of a Rebecca West, a Virginia Woolf, an Elinor Wylie.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Louis Kronenberger, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Townsend Warner has to be one of the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century. This, my favourite of her novels, has a disaffected Victorian wife falling for her husband's charismatic mistress, and discovering revolutionary politics along the way.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sarah Waters\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is need for a respectful tone in speaking of Miss Warner, for she manages certain things superlatively well...Her imagination and verbal skill place her far above the average contemporary novelist; \u003ci\u003eSummer Will Show\u003c\/i\u003e is filled with original phrasings and apt figures of speech.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Ralph Thompson, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We learned to expect excellence of [Warner]...when she published \u003ci\u003eSummer Will Show\u003c\/i\u003e...She has an extraordinary capacity for being subtle without holding her narrative to the plaintive, precious, minor key that usually accompanies subtlety in modern novels.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Charles Poore, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The novel of [Sylvia Townsend Warner]'s with the strongest lesbian subtext is \u003ci\u003eSummer Will Show\u003c\/i\u003e; it's also, I think, her best book. It's a novel of female fascinations, in which a conventional Victorian wife, Sophia Willoughby, follows her philandering husband to Paris, only to find herself falling in love with his charismatic storytelling mistress, Minna.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sarah Waters, \u003ci\u003eOut Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Playing the game of choosing the century's finest writers, England's literary pundits conspicuously failed to mention Sylvia Townsend Warner. The omission was, frankly, bizarre...Shame on the list makers, then, for such aberration. It's almost as bad as leaving Jane Austne out of a roundup of early 19th-century British novelists.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Her novels, short stories, poems--and now letters--are the work of a minor artist, but an artist blessed with a poised, felicitous command of language and the ability to portray both the ordinary and the odd with charming, compassionate wit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Michiko Kakutani,\u003ci\u003e The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Set in Paris during the revolutionary spring of 1848, Summer Will Show tells of the struggle of Sophia Willoughby, a woman set adrift by the death of her children, for self-understanding, commitment, love. With the arrival of Minna Lemuel, her husband's mistress, the novel unexpectedly takes a turn that gives it greater dimension and weight. In Minna, Warner created one of the more memorable female characters in modern fiction. Summer Will Show...demonstrates the same virtues of wit and compassion that grace all of her work.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSylvia Townsend Warner \u003c\/b\u003e(1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a devoted member of the Communist Party. Her many books include \u003ci\u003eMr. Fortune’s Maggot \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eLolly Willows\u003c\/i\u003e (both published by NYRB Classics), \u003ci\u003eThe Corner that Held Them\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eKingdoms of Elfin\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eClaire Harman’s\u003c\/b\u003e first book, a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304259899621,"sku":"NP9781590173169","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590173169.jpg?v=1767737524","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/summer-will-show-isbn-9781590173169","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}