The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

When I joined the Young Socialists in London in the sixties, I had already come out as a lesbian - come out, that is, to my lover and myself, to my brother and one or two friends. But coming out to the comrades was completely out of the question. As far as I knew, there were no lesbian socialists; I'd never encountered one in person, in a book, or in the media. A couple of years later, I devoured the thirties writings of those camp semi-lefties, Isherwood and Auden; for a decade my lesbian identity was thickly encrusted with gay male identification. How I wish I had known earlier about Sylvia Townsend Warner's writings and her courageous, passionate life - as novelist and poet, thirties communist, and lesbian living openly for 39 years with her lover, Valentine Ackland. Her Diaries record the intensely conscious, observant, day-to-day living of an extraordinary woman writer; they are a fascinating new document of lesbian history.

Warner began keeping a diary in 1927 when she was 33 years old, and continued, with some considerable gaps in the 1930s and '40s, until her death 51 years later. Claire Harman writes that this volume represents only about one-fifth of the complete diaries; Warner's estate permitted her to compile the volume on literary grounds, even though Warner had told Susanna Pinney, her executor, that her diaries were "too sad" to publish. I have no means, apart from what Harman says in her introduction, of evaluating her selection from the 38 notebooks in the Dorset County Museum. But after reading this volume, I am extremely eager to read the rest of Warner's and Ackland's papers.

Two themes dominate and unify the diaries: Warner's constant minute observation and description of nature, and her 48-year-long account, continuing …