Review: Elaine Blair on Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s strange and bewitching novel The Corner That Held Them, a work of heroic subtlety, is set over about forty years in a fourteenth-century English Benedictine convent in the Fens. Though the Plague occupies only one early section, it establishes the basic structure of the novel: large impersonal forces—disease, weather, time—sweep…