Summer Will Show

Sophia Willoughby, a young English woman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed off her unsatisfactory and improvident husband to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She will devote herself 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 Sophia has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband's sometime mistress. Minna leads Sophia on a wild adventure through Bohemian and revolutionary Paris. Sylvia Townsend Warner, was one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century English novelists as well as a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Summer Will Show is the most out-and-out exciting of Warner's novels and a brilliant re-imagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893—1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music. Two of her books, Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, have already appeared in the NYRB Classics series.

Claire Harman’s 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 and edited works by Stevenson and Warner. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.