“Story with an Hypothesis”: women and war in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s forgotten short story

Abstract

In the mid-1930s, Sylvia Townsend Warner became increasingly concerned by the looming threat of war and its likely impact on women. Unlike the First World War, which was overwhelmingly fought on battlefields by men, the next war would put women’s lives at risk in air raids on civilian targets. Warner developed a new narrative mode with which to imagine women’s liberation in these years of rising masculine militarism. Abandoning her 1920s narratives, which imagined women’s liberation as a withdrawal from patriarchal modernity into natural spaces, Warner envisaged liberation as depending upon women’s political participation. She began this aesthetic process in “Story with an Hypothesis,” a short story that appeared in the February 1935 issue of The London Mercury, a British literary periodical. A significant element of Warner’s oeuvre, “Story with an Hypothesis” has nevertheless been neglected. It appeared neither in A Garland of Straw (1943), a collection that included many 1930s short stories, nor in any other collection published during her lifetime. Although Warner’s fiction, like that of many British interwar women writers, was republished by Virago in the late 1970s, “Story with an Hypothesis” was not included in the publisher’s Selected Stories (1990). (In fact, it has only been reprinted in one venue: the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Newsletter, in 2003.) The story’s neglect is unfortunate, as it provides valuable insight into an important transitional phase in Warner’s literary career. In its rural setting and depiction of Anastasia, a solitary woman engaging in a creative relationship to nature, “Story with an Hypothesis” has much in common with Warner’s writing of the 1920s and early 1930s. However, Anastasia’s domination by Edmund, a sinister figure associated throughout the text with war, departs fromWarner’s previous representations of natural spaces as sites of women’s potential liberation. The story thus illustrates Warner’s under-recognized convictions about how liberation should be imagined and narrated in a period characterized by war’s looming threat.