Abroad Among Our Kind: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Civil War Love Poems

Aguirre, Mercedes

Abroad Among Our Kind: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Civil War Love Poems

Resource type

Journal article

Creator (person)

Aguirre, Mercedes

Date published

January 2023

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland arrived in Barcelona in the fall of 1936, two months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. They had come to help with the relief operations being organized by the Communist Party of Great Britain to support the Republican side after the military coup by Francisco Franco. The nonintervention agreement that had been signed at the beginning of the conflict by several democratic nations, including Britain, prevented British citizens from obtaining visas to visit Spain. Ackland's diary records that they had to make three attempts to cross the Spanish frontier at the Pyrenees, eventually reaching Barcelona on September 26, 1936. Warner and Ackland were driven by a desire to help stop the alarming advance of Fascism in Europe, and to personally experience a conflict that from its outset had been widely reported in the British press. From the beginning of the war, they had sided with the Spanish Republic, whose progressive policies they fervently defended. On arrival in Barcelona, they were struck by the euphoric revolutionary atmosphere of the city, where cafes, theatres, shops, and factories had been collectivized, and workers had formed their own militias to defend the city from the Fascist uprising. While they only stayed for three weeks, this first visit was the beginning of Warner's involvement over many years with the cause of the Spanish left.