Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Harrow, England, in 1893. She lived in Dorset until her death in the spring of 1978.

A serious student of fifteenth and sixteenth century music, she was for ten years one of four editors of Tudor Church Music, a compilation in ten volumes. In 1925 she published The Espalier, a book of verse. Lolly Willowes was her first novel. It appeared in 1926, and was followed in the next two years by Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The True Heart. These books helped to found her a considerable literary reputation.

Each of her novels deals with a different aspect of life, and indeed with different periods of history. Her work ranged from a picture of life in a fourteenth century French convent, The Corner That Held Them (1943), to uprisings of 1848 in Paris, Summer Will Show (1936).

She published in all twenty books: seven novels, four books of poetry, a volume of essays and a biography. Her short stories, most of which we re contributed over a period of forty years to the New Yorker Magazine, filled eight volumes. Her biography of T. H. White received critical acclaim. She edited and wrote an introduction to the recent edition of White's Book of Merlyn.

At the time of her death she was a work making a selection of her best short stories for one volume, and was also writing a new preface to this edition of Lolly Willowes. She was unfortunately unable to complete either project.