John Barnard, leading merchant at a Norfolk port, is a pillar of nineteenth-century rectitude. Though stern and aloof with his indolent, tippling wife and watchful children, he is undermined by helpless love for his pretty, cold-hearted daughter Mary. THE FLINT ANCHOR subverts the rules of the historical novel and shows how family history is made- which stories can be trusted, whose voices hold influence and whose are forgotten. Wit, charm and intelligence illuminate several decades of family life and the events of small town society in this tragi-comedy of manners, the last of the author's seven novels.
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'A novel created with solidity and subtlety of feeling, a fusion of warmth, wit and quietly biting shrewdness that are reminiscent of Jane Austen' ATLANTIC REVIEW 'Hurrah to Virago for re-publishing this mesmerising novel...Stern father, brandy-swilling mother, dutiful but rebellious offspring - wicked' WOMAN'S JOURNAL 'One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers.' Hermoine Lee
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A family unhappy in its own way,
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This review is from: Flint Anchor Pb (Virago Modern Classics, 435) (Paperback)
All of Sylvia Towsend Warner's novels are superb, but this and another of her historical novels, THE CORNER THAT HELD THEM, are her two true masterpeices, which means they are among the best books in English written in the twentieth century. This work concerns a very proper family of a wealthy East Anglia merchant living in the town of Loseby on the British coast during the early nineteenth century through the mid-Victorian period. John Barnard greatly loves his wife and many children, but his innocent insistence upon rectitude and controlling his children (and choosing favorites among them) creates great unhappiness and ruins most of his children's lives. The genius of the story lies not only in Townsend Warner's extremely enchanting wordplay but also in her absolute command of narrative voice: the narrative focalizes from one character to another with utter deftness, and you see fully the characters' abilities to make each other miserable by not saying what they truly feel. The book is very moving, but it is also (as with all of Townsend Warner's novels) exceptionally funny; like all of Townsend Warner's historical fiction, it suggests that history for individuals may be experienced very differently on their own level than from the perspective of a genuine later historian.
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