Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion.

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 she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband's sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her...

Both stimulating and engaging, these poems display an astonishing capacity for wit, rich observations, and the cadences of poetic language. Documenting the life of Sylvia Townsend Warner, these poems emphasize her gift for music while exploringlife, communist sympathies, and above all, the anguish and liberation of her great love affair with fellow poet Valentine Ackland."