'I wasn't educated, I was very lucky': Sylvia Townsend Warner and Education

Abstract

The fictional works of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) are primarily situated within a tradition of Marxist and feminist politics, or lesbian modernism. This thesis proposes that several of her works written and published mostly in the interwar years can be read through an alternative lens of education and pedagogy. By exploring Warner’s engagement with educational debates and contexts that developed from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s, this is a revisionist thesis that offers a new perspective for interpreting and understanding her authorial projects. This thesis employs extensive archival scholarship and conducts historicist readings of a selection of short stories and novels, presenting them as heuristic case studies for considering Warner’s engagement with education. It demonstrates that her fiction manifests a gradual but clear shift from a concern with the education of the ‘bourgeois’ individual to that of the masses. Warner exposes and critiques the contradictions inherent in traditional educational models that sought to democratise learning, whilst perpetuating inequalities of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Consequently, her fiction posits alternative pedagogical and educational practices that enable individuals to develop more autonomous and political subjectivities that are restricted, if not wholly denied, within conventional forums. Furthermore, it is by exploring the interrelationship between Warner’s political activism and fiction that she can be seen to endeavour to develop politically empowered, self-reflexive, and critically aware individuals who engage in effective praxis to undermine and transform their own often marginalised status, and effect revolutionary change in society. It is for these reasons, combined with Warner’s awareness that education is always an inherently political act and contains transformative potential, that she can be seen to pre-empt some of the central tenets that came to define the philosophy of education Critical Pedagogy in the 1960s. In its entirety, this thesis demonstrates that Warner was concerned with questions that asked how much and to what kinds of knowledge individuals have access, who should teach them, and whose interests education should serve. It not only illuminates concerns that remain relevant today, but establishes that Warner’s fiction provides crucial insight into how we read and understand women writers as social, political, and educational critics.