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The Corner That Held Them (1948)

por Sylvia Townsend Warner

Otros autores: Ver la sección otros autores.

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5801840,672 (3.92)162
"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend Warner's masterpiece"--… (más)
  1. 10
    England, Arise: The People, the King, and the Great Revolt of 1381 por Juliet Barker (CurrerBell)
    CurrerBell: The last couple of chapters of The Corner That Held Them (this is no SPOILER) involve the Peasant's Revolt of 1381.
  2. 00
    In This House of Brede por Rumer Godden (CurrerBell)
    CurrerBell: The Corner That Held Them has a great deal of comedy and humor, while In This House of Brede is more serious in tone.
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Mostrando 1-5 de 18 (siguiente | mostrar todos)
This is such a rich and enjoyable saga about 30 or so years in the history of a convent. There is not one central plot, rather characters come and go, bringing their storylines along with them, some chapters working more like short stories within a longer overall story and setting.

Its highly entertaining in places, though sometimes goes into baffling detail about the workings of a 14th century nunnery. This was all interesting to learn, but I most enjoyed the scheming and secrets and general mayhem between the different characters. ( )
  AlisonSakai | Jun 9, 2023 |
Ok, I loved, loved, loved The Corner That Held Them so I’m about to go on way too long about it. #SorryNotSorry #TLDR

What did I love?

The cover and the title!

The characters!

Yes there are a lot of them. “Innumerable and insignificant” as the author herself wrote, to a friend. I don’t know how she did it, but the author managed to give us a rundown of the first 200-years of the convent of Oby in a mere 24 pages. Then, on page 25 we meet Sir Ralph Kello in 1349, during the Black Plague. The rest of the book is about him and the nuns over a course of only 33 years. During that short period of time there are four different Prioresses: Alicia, Johanna, Matilda, and Margaret. Then we have the various nuns, novices, bishops, baliffs, villagers, laborers, and beggars.

Plot

Even the author says there’s not really a plot. For me, there are many individual “plots” as each character has a specific desire or fear that they go about getting or avoiding.

One character wants a beautiful spire for the chapel, another character wants to be Prioress, another anchoress, another priest…bishop. One has a secret and struggles with being damned and fear of being found out,

There were also several adventures taken…

a journey to York to find a lawyer,
a journey to Brocton to acquire a new hawk where a poem about a gentle giant is discovered
a journey to Esselby to collect rents. On the way, this particular character is introduced to and sings Ars Nova style with a Chaplain and a leper (How cool that we can pull up the Kyrie by Machault on Spotify!) “Again! Let us sing it again!” he cries.
There is drama. A murder. There is scandal. There are rumors, and slander. People go mad.

The Candlemas Cuckoo!!!

The Fish-Pond!!!

The alter-hanging!

The green staff!

All the drama that unfolds after the nuns decide they must hide their gold & silver from the insurgents!!

Structure
I loved how there would be one long paragraph about a new character and then a one-sentence segue into some new situation or drama, such as “It was through him (new character) that the novices began to practice levitation.”

I learned stuff!
I didn’t know anything about medieval times or how convents worked so I found all of it quite fascinating and had to take a lot of notes and look up a lot of words. I had my (paper) dictionary next to me at all times.

I learned about
convents and manor houses and about convents relying on the nuns dowries (ranging from money to a yearly supply of wine), and about the various roles in a convent, prioress, infirmress, treasuress, cellaress, etc.

the importance of receiving relics (one of Magdalene’s tears in a bottle, the tooth of one of the Holy Innocents–I had to Google “Holy Innocents”)

the Interdict of 1208 which was a real thing

composers Machault & Landini

Definitions and meanings I had to look up
harridan , extreme unction, wicket, pursuivant, shrive, he left in a dudgeon, efficacious, contrition, stripes were salutary, cavils, for the nonce, lollardry, Trinity cope, corrodian, custo, dropsy, acedia (accidie), anchoress, retinue, mitre, admonitory end of his crozier, pedantic, laity, confederate tooth, a white sepulchre, music in measure, prolations, triste loysir, mors demoy, the longs (in music), Kyrie, Guillaume de Machaut, sarsenet, verderer, apoplexy, somnolent…

Unfusable – I couldn’t find this spelling in the dictionary or via Google so I’m still not sure what it means.

Aquinas – Still trying to find out what that is. A character puts a letter away in one so it’s not St. Thomas Aquinas. Hmm…maybe he was reading a publication by or about Aquinas so he shoved the letter in the book? Dunno.

Writing – Random blurbs that grabbed me.

The nuns arrived, bright as a flock of magpies.

They would then be able to give an undivided attention to the mortifying tranquility of their lives.

What love is to some women, and needlework to more, litigation was to Richenda.

Dame Cecilia had fits & began to prophesy. This infuriated Richenda, to whom any talk of the end of the world after she had worked so hard and successfully to put the convent on a good footing for the next century, seemed rank ingratitude.

The Bishop was still nursing his wrath.

The Bishop’s approval was not necessary, but after the business of Prior Isabella, no one at Oby was going to risk slighting a Bishop.

For in times of calamity people will do nothing unless they are paid on the nail for it.

All across Europe the pestilence had come, and now it would traverse England, and nothing could stop it, wherever there were men living it would seek them out, and turn back, as a wolf does, to snap at the man it had passed by.

Black Death, a sorcerer travelling from China had shifted the balance of Christendom & killed half the folk in England.

…talking calmly (as one does when all hope is gone).

When a Priest starts manspaining to Dame Blanch: “Pedantic fool!” She thought.

You did not disturb me. A flea bit me in the breast.

Dame Salome didn’t want to be treasurer but they picked her because the position was going to be uncomfortable and Dame Salome is one of those mild, pillowy women who can be squeezed into tight places.

Pernelle Bastable, a bower woman, arrives and scarcely had she done with exclaiming over the delight of being settled and tranquil at last before the horse was saddled and Pernelle hooded for another journey.

Arriving at the Inn, Pernelle takes charge, ordering hot water, chickens, pillows…”It is wonderful what God sends us” remarked Dame Helen. “First a Priest, now a Pernelle.”

A frosty day coming in December scratched one’s eyes, the sunlight was so suddenly brilliant.

Time – No summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster.

She plunged her smooth hand into the belly of a goose.

The nuns found it hard to conceal their weariness and their disillusionment (for it is disillusioning to discover that compassion stretched out too long, materializes into nothing more than a feat of endurance.

Dame Salome, with one of those flashes of worldly wisdom which at times emerge from very stupid well-meaning people, said: Now we can expect a crop of slanders. For when people do you an injury they always slander you afterwards.

Of all menaces to peace & quiet, a visionary nun is the worst, and when that nun is the novice mistress the worst is ten times worsened.

That is the drawback of being so very sensible: one cannot take counsel because it is against common sense to seek it. The metal of common sense is so lonely and unfusable that for people like Dame Matilda there is no career except to be a tyrant or a superlative drudge.

But then what is a belief? A thought lodges in the mind, will not out, preserves its freshness and color and flexibility like the corpse of a saint: Is this belief or is it heresy.

The tweedle of a wren.

He lacked whatever it is that holds a man to his purpose.

People who allowed themselves to mock at a priest were but half a step from beastly lollardry.

No matter. We are nuns, we don’t think.

In every community there must be someone who is odd man out.

Wasps are the laity of bees.

Sanctimonious old gadfly.

Routine and its slow mildewing of the mind.

He laid out a music-book among the mutton bones and the breadcrumbs.

If Triste Loysir had seemed a foretaste of paradise, the Kyrie was paradise itself. Again! Let us sing it again!

As he lay in bed at the Chaplain’s house: It struck him that every bug in the place must have heard the good news and forsaken the lepers for flesh that was a novelty.

William Holly thinks he swallowed a tiny toad in his salad.

“God’s bones!”

Those experienced in dispair are seldom good comforters, though the world prefers to believe otherwise.

Bible humor

“This is my 7th year as custos of Oby. It’s a long time. At least it is a long time in which to have got nothing done.”

“The patriarch Jacob served seven years for Leah and another seven years for Rachael. And I don’t know that he got much out of it,” remarked Sir Ralph.

This book was written in 1948, but wouldn’t this make a good social media profile?

Perkin de Craye – Bishop. A fat, smooth, proud man with a stammer. Caring only for Our Lady, works of art, ritual, and foreign cheeses.

Shout out to Lory @ Entering The Enchanted Castle for introducing me to Sylvia Townsend Warner vand to Helen @ Gallimaufry for her Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week posts.



( )
1 vota Jinjer | Aug 12, 2022 |
I had such a muddled reaction to this book, and those who commented to me in advance that it is bizarrely paced were spot on. At times I got really into it, and then on the next page I got completely bogged down and more often than not lost the thread of the story.

The story chronicles the lives of nuns at a nunnery over three decades in the fourteenth century. Major potential plot points come and go without a great deal of fuss, to the point that I kept regularly glossing over key sentences and then realising in the next few pages that I'd obviously completely missed something key. Normally I can quite happily read without distraction whilst the TV blares in the background and my family carry out a conversation over the top of my head, but that just didn't work with this book. It requires 100% attention, and I probably didn't get the full experience that I could have done if I'd had the luxury of reading it at a leisurely pace in peace and quiet.

It's a work of genius in many ways, yet at times it required stamina to keep my attention with it so veered into slog territory. It's probably the most lost I've got in a book's plot in quite some time, and sadly I mean lost as in confused rather than lost in a dreamy happy place. Many passages were quite dense with no particular focus, and I didn't notice I wasn't giving it my full attention until I realised that yet again I'd lost track of who was now prioress and the back-story of the nun currently under discussion.

3.5 stars - a work of beauty in many places, but not a book for snatched bouts of reading, and one that I was quite glad to finish in the end. ( )
1 vota AlisonY | Aug 21, 2021 |
Honestly, this book literally put me to sleep more nights than not. It's very hard to keep all the nuns straight and the story just meanders. A convent is founded in 1163. We begin following it in earnest in the 14th century, through a multitude of prioresses. A main character and constant throughout is Sir Ralph, a passing beggar who for reasons even he doesn't understand passes himself off as a priest, and lives as the convent priest for the rest of his life. This at least provides a unifying thread through all the cast of nuns who die as frequently as they are introduced.

Couple of good sample quotes:

"To be traveling through this landscape so full of plenty and variety was like turning the pages of an illuminated psalter."

"But no summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster." ( )
1 vota Tytania | Aug 11, 2021 |
It's due and I am not feeling this contemplative. It's a really nice strain of contemplative though and I can imagine finishing it someday. I found it hard to keep track of the prioresses and nuns and wished there were more physical descriptions but I suppose that's part of the point of the nunnery, to reduce everyone to the same.
I have the impression that STW was working from budgets and court transcripts and dry docs like that. She fleshes them out very convincingly.
  Je9 | Aug 10, 2021 |
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Sylvia Townsend Warnerautor principaltodas las edicionescalculado
Harman, ClaireIntroducciónautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Hensher, PhilipIntroducciónautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
Rabinovitch, AnneTraductorautor secundarioalgunas edicionesconfirmado
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For neither might the corner that held them

keep them from fear

THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON XVII 4
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To
Valentine Ackland
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Alianor de Retteville lay on her bed and looked at Giles who was her lover. She did not speak. She had nothing to say. He did not speak either.
Of Sylvia Townsend Warner's seven novels, The Corner That Held Them was her favourite and one of the most popular. (Introduction)
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"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend Warner's masterpiece"--

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