Customer Reviews

The Corner That Held Them (Virago Modern Classics)

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Townsend Warner started this novel with the intention of producing a Marxist-Leninist account of how a community of women made their living in the medieval period. That probably sounds deadly dull, but the book itself is anything but: indeed, it remains one of the most page-turning novels I've read in years. Detailing the lives of a convent through eighty years in the Middle Ages, THE CORNER THAT HELD THEM defies any simple explanation of its plot: nuns come and they leave; mothers superior replace their predecessors and then make new plans for the community (which often come to fruition and often don't); people affiliated with the community are born and then later die. Yet despite its apparent random nature, this remains one of the most engrossing books I can imagine: from its beginnings in disastrous marital infidelity to its unforgettable conclusion of desperate betrayal, it has all the fascination of real lived experience.

There is everything to love about this novel, and nothing to dislike: hilarity, tenderness, complexity of characterization, shocks, unexpected twists, occasional heartbreak, and the inexhaustible panoply of human kind. The core "message"-although this is much more than a message novel-is impermanence. By looking at one convent over several generations, we are reminded of the certainty that we will all die and eventually be forgotten, which is why the author exhorts us to love as much as we can, before it's over. "Here I am, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike." Aren't we all, religious or not! "I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead." So what to do? Laugh! Eat! Flirt with the priest (who, by the way, is an impostor). This is not just a chick-novel. Its pages are full of men who drift in and out of the convent and its surrounds and are as fascinating--and as unpredictable--as the women. What do to? Fall into the stream on a summer day and float. Or scheme and connive. Note the expressive, always surprising language. "Though in the main she was zealously self-deceiving, she had filaments of shrewdness floating from her, and it was with one of these that she sensed that other people were willing enough to be scandalized, and that there was plenty to scandalize them." Like another splendid novel, SHIP OF FOOLS, this one takes the full range of human possibility, compresses it in time and space, and holds it up for our delight. Coincidentally, it restores a sense of perspective to those of us who, fixed in our careers like candles on a spike, imagine the world will not turn without our effort. Very humbling, and sparkling with humor.