And, as the description says "Then tragedy strikes: the children die." She has been raised a lady, a woman who is to occupy herself as wife and mother, doing needlework and writing letters. She recognizes she is no good at these tasks. Sophia despairs that she has no purpose in life. In 1847, an English woman did not travel alone, though she might have only her maid to accompany her. But Sophia, in a sort of revolution, takes herself to Paris - alone. Sophia resists the change which begins with her children's death like a fish in a net, but the end product is an ode to ripping your life apart, to imagining other futures. It is about living outside of men and money. It is about living with other people, not against them. It is about loving a woman who is not perfect, but through that love and understanding gaining meaning in your own life and being able to love the whole world. (It's very romantic in a low key way!) Sophia resolves to visit her husband in Paris. She will obtain from him another chance at motherhood even though she knows that he is involved with a disquietening Jewish woman, Minna, whose lifestyle places her amongst the Parisian underclass and its communities of itinerant artists and revolutionaries. Her search for Edward brings her to Minna’s parlour and there discovers the woman’s capacity to enchant audiences with accounts of her life from it origins in rural Lithuania to her present station.

Steinman, Michael, The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell (Counterpoint 2001) She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris – but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband’s Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel: a b c d e Maroula Joannou, "Warner, Sylvia Townsend", in Faye Hammill, Esme Miskimmin, Ashlie Sponenberg (eds.) An Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950. Palgrave, 2008 ISBN 0-230-22177-7 (pp. 266-7)Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset. Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn’t seem particularly upset about it. Indeed, it seems to be par for the course. Warnerexpertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

This book is odd, fascinating and uneven. What's wonderful about it is practically sublime; that which is mediocre about it balloons and overtakes the plot and the narration by the conclusion. So what's wonderful about it, as far as I'm concerned, is the fact that this book was published in the same year as Gone with the Wind, yet it's practically the anti-Gone With the Wind.Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband – even with the obstacle of Minna. She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners. The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it’s one of the things which makes Angela Young’s accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) – Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se. Here’s another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much: Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner (6 December 1893 – 1 May 1978) was an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. A young woman, unhappily married, Sophia had banished her intellectually inferior, bland husband to pursuits which took him largely to the continent and Paris in particular. She remains on her estate to oversee the rearing of her two young children and generally to scold and bully the servants. Wilful and arrogant, she is contained by something which could be the parameters of an ultimately narrow, unimaginative mind, or perhaps the proto-feminism of an earlier time, when a woman might feel the oppression inflicted on her by society without knowing what name to call it.