Dorset unveils statue of feminist writer and LGBTQ+ pioneer – and a cat | books

“T“The thing that all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the main character in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel Lolly Willows, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the country, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

Although women’s lives are so restricted by society, Lolli notes, they “know that they are dynamite… and they know in their hearts how dangerous they are, how incalculable they are, how exceptional they are.”

Warner herself was never dull: a writer, translator, musicologist, and political activist who wrote seven novels and extensive poetry and contributed more than 150 short stories to The New Yorker, more than any other writer. She was also a Communist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War and a pioneer in the LGBTQ+ community, and lived with the poet Valentine Acland for decades in the sleepy Dorset village, in a partnership they described as marriage.

In the 1930s, Warner was described as “famous on two continents for her numerous and brilliant contributions to literature”, but although many of her works remain in print, her name has faded from widespread recognition, even in the province where she lived.

That is set to change this weekend, when a statue of Warner will be unveiled in Dorchester. The sculpture, designed by Denise Dutton, shows Warner sitting on a bench accompanied by a cat, a reference to the creatures she loved and the companion of the witch in her most famous novel.

Anya Pearson, who led the campaign to erect the statue, said that by placing the life-sized statue in the city’s main shopping district, “we are saying very clearly that women’s stories and queer women’s stories belong in our public spaces.” “Sylvia pushed boundaries, wrote fearlessly, and lived authentically. This statue allows us to finally celebrate her as her authentic self, with pride and candor, in the city she called home.”

Pearson is a veteran of this sort of thing, having previously been the driving force behind the statue of Victorian fossil hunter and paleontologist Mary Anning in nearby Lyme Regis. After the statue was unveiled to great local enthusiasm in 2022, Pearson has set her sights on her home city of Dorchester, where statues commemorate writers Thomas Hardy and William Barnes – but so far, no non-royal women.

The campaign, which solicited nominations from overlooked women, received more than 50 names which were shortlisted and then put to a vote. Warner “won by a landslide,” says Pearson, who works at Arts University Bournemouth. The £60,000 cost was raised through crowdsourcing and a number of significant international donations.

But in the digital age, what is the value of a statue? “It’s about what cities choose to remember and celebrate,” says Pearson. “It may be easy to overlook statues,” she said, “but they are so important because of the subliminal message they leave.” If they are all men and men of war, we tell our children that these are the only things worth remembering. The battles and wars and the men who fought in them.

“For me, this is the antidote to this symbolic annihilation of women in our urban landscape. It brings them back into the story,” she added.

Pearson’s successes with Anning and Warner have led to calls for her help from other women’s bust campaigners, some of whom have joined a loose group called Visible Women UK. As well as statues of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, west London, and Aphra Behn in Canterbury, which have already been put up, other groups are working to create monuments to suffragist Mary Clarke in Brighton, factory worker Ada Nield Chew in Crewe and others elsewhere.

Sam Johnson became involved in a campaign to commemorate the East London Match Girls after accidentally discovering that her great-grandmother, Sarah Chapman, had been a leader of their influential 1888 strike protesting poor wages and terrible working conditions.

Although the factory site – now a private housing development – bears an English Heritage plaque, Johnson and Pearson are working together on the campaign’s ultimate goal of erecting a statue in a nearby park.

“I have this vision in my mind of three or four figures on the ground,” Johnson says. “I don’t want anything on a pedestal because they have to be neat and friendly. I like the idea of ​​school kids going to visit them…as a reminder that this thing, in fact, happened on the road you live on. And you can be brave and brave and wonderful too“.