A lovely, late association copy of the 1966 PUP edition of Thomas Medwin’s “racy, entertaining, and valuable contemporary account” of Lord Byron, inscribed in the year of publication by the British poet Valentine Ackland to her lover Sylvia Townsend Warner: “Sylvia. my Love. Valentine. 6.XII.66.”
In July 1966 STW was at work on her biography of T. H. White, and, on occasion, trying to avoid VA and her ex-lover Elizabeth Wade White lunching in Dorchester (Diaries, 1994).
A source of inspiration and more for STW, in 1974 she wrote to William Maxwell that Byron was “for a long time [...] the only poet I knew as a poet outside a book,” having encountered him through the shared environs of Harrow: “And the view Byron looked at was the view, not much changed, from my nursery window”, she told her ex-editor. She had borrowed the story of the schoolboy Byron sitting on John Peachey’s tomb composing poetry for her own poem ‘Allegra,’ published in the 1928 collection, Time Importuned: “‘There with a book lies he, or else he will raise/ His handsome head, and gaze/ Out over the plain with a look made free/ At the westering sun, and the elm-tops afloat in the haze/ Like shadowy islands remote in a golden sea.” (Letters, 1982). HARMON, Claire (ed.; 1994) The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: Chatto & Windus); STW & William Maxwell (1982) Letters. London: Chatto & Windus. [ref: 3666]