Summer Will Show

By Sylvia Townsend Warner

Book Overview

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. 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. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590173163
• ISBN13: 9781590173169
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Summer Will Show

Summer Will Show is Sylvia Townsend Warner's most bold lesbian novel. The book uses numerous scenes and even characters from other great English novels such as Great Expectations. After Sophia Willoughby loses her children to smallpox, she goes to find her husband with his mistress in Paris. She finds them both and his mistress Minna and Sophia find themselves unnaturally drawn to each other. Eventually they find themselves to be soulmates and both become actively involved in the French Revolution. The book contains the wonderful style and metaphors characteristic of Sylvia Townsend Warner. A must-read for Warner fans.

Warner's lesbian Marxist masterpiece

A witty, romantic, political, feminist classic, Summer Will Show is the coming-out story of Sophia Willoughby, an apparently rigidly conventional upper-class early Victorian lady. Her history is gloriously downwardly-mobile as she abandons her arid marriage and ancestral home to find love in the arms of her husband's ex-mistress and life in the underground activities of the new communist movement during the Revolution of 1848 in Paris. Warner's delight in the absurd and the romantic is balanced by her meticulous sense of history; first published in 1936, her narrative's vitality reflects her new political excitement--she joined the communist party in its fight against fascism in 1935--and her day-to-day delight in her ongoing lesbian relationship with poet Valentine Ackland. Summer Will Show is the best "lesbian novel" I have read; celebratory, funny, and worldly-wise, it carries no trace of the anxiety in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and most other representations of lesbianism of that time.