townsend warner

Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her unsatisfactory and improvident husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She will devote herself, in the image of her own father, to the serious business of properly raising her two children. Then 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.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists as well as a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, where William Maxwell was her editor. Summer Will Show is the most out-and-out exciting of Warner’s novels and a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.