The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society

Journal aims and scope

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is a peer reviewed, open access journal aiming to create a wider interest in this brilliant, original and witty writer. It features scholarly articles, previously unpublished archival works by Warner, and pieces by well-known contemporary writers describing their appreciation of Warner.

Although there has been a revival of Sylvia Townsend Warner's work in recent years, she remains an under-appreciated figure. Warner (1893-1978) was a highly individual writer of novels, short stories and poems, and a contemporary of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926) established her as a new literary talent and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina. She contributed short stories to the New Yorker for more than forty years, and went on to write six more novels ranging far and wide in time and place, dazzlingly full of what she called “the oddness of the world and the surprisingness of mankind”. Her reputation was re-established in the 1970s, when her work was published by the newly launched Virago Modern Classics imprint.

From 2018 The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society will be published twice a year, online in open access form, providing access to a much wider readership.

Journal society information

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is owned by the The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society which launched in January 2000 in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s home town of Dorchester by a group of enthusiasts, who assembled for an inaugural meeting at the Dorchester County Museum. The Society has since grown, and now hosts a variety of events in Dorchester and London. The aim of the Society is to promote a wide readership and a better understanding of the writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as a sense of community among readers, scholars, and admirers of her work.

The Society regularly organises visits to places connected with Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, including to Norfolk, Dorset, Essex, and Sussex. Each year, the writers’ birthdays are marked with a poetry reading in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Chaldon Herring.

As well as publishing the Journal and Newsletter, the Society hosts an annual essay competition, the details of which will be posted on this website. The Society has also supported two conferences dedicated to the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, held in Dorchester in 2012 and Manchester in 2019.

Readers can find more information about the society at http://townsendwarner.com.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Committee

Chair: Janet Montefiore
Acting Secretary: Janet Montefiore
Treasurer: Helen Jones
Membership Secretary: Mercedes Aguirre
Website: Harriet Baker
Journal Editor: Peter Swaab
Newsletter Editor: Jay Barksdale

Editorial Board

Editor: Prof Peter Swaab, Department of English, UCL, UK.
Editorial Assistant: Mercedes Aguirre, British Library, UK

Dame Gillian Beer, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK 
Prof Maud Ellmann, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago, USA 
Prof Claire Harman, Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK 
Prof Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Tübingen, Germany 
Prof Janet Montefiore, School of English, University of Kent, UK 
Judith Stinton, Independent writer, UK
Dr Helen Sutherland, Centre for Open Studies, University of Glasgow, UK
Peter Tolhurst, Black Dog Books, UK

Journal information

ISSN: 2398-0605 
Homepage: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/the-journal-of-the-sylvia-townsend-warner-society

Published by:
UCL Press
University College London (UCL)
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT

UCL Press website: https://www.uclpress.co.uk
UCL Press email: uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk
UCL Press twitter: @uclpress
UCL Press Journals Editorial Policy: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/journals-editorial-policy

Publication frequency: The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society publishes two issues per year.

Contact the journal

All general enquiries should be made to the Editor.

Open-access policy

All articles published in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 international license agreement and published open access, making them immediately and freely available to read and download. The CC-BY license agreement allows authors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of the work. Further information regarding this can be found in our Journals Editorial Policy.

Abstracting & indexing

UCL Press work with subject specific indexers to deposit published articles in relevant repositories and search databases. Articles published in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society are indexed in the following:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• OpenAIRE
• ScienceOpen database
• Portico digital archive
• UCL Discovery
• Google Scholar
• Baidu

Peer review

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society operates double blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review.

Further information regarding peer review can be found on our editorial policy pages, here.

Article publication charges (APC)

UCL Press journals do not charge an Article-Processing Charge (APC) for submission or publication in this journal. The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society authors will not be required to make an APC payment for submission or publication of their article. 

Archival content

Previous volumes of The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society are available via the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. Please contact the society for further information, or to read more please visit the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society website.

How to submit

Authors should follow the journal’s author guidelines. Manuscripts that are not formatted appropriately for the journal will be referred to edit accordingly before peer review.

All submissions should be sent to the Editor. Please email your full manuscript, author CV, as well as a 300 word abstract to the Editor at p.swaab@ucl.ac.uk
Before submitting to the journal, all authors must have read and agreed to the journal’s editorial policy.

Preparing your manuscript

Authors are requested to reference the UCL Press author guidelines, as well as the following specific instructions outlined here. It is the responsibility of the author to ensure adherence to the style guide. Please note that editors will not undertake any extensive formatting to this extent, and anything not adhering to the guidelines might be returned for revision.

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society operates double blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review. The word count should be clearly indicated. All submissions must be in .doc or .docx format to facilitate the peer-review process.

Formatting

Title page (non-blinded version)
Include the full title, the full names of contributing authors including their institutions/affiliation and address, and their institutional email address (including ORCiD ID’s). The corresponding author should also be identified.

Abstract
Present the abstract as an overview of your article (up to 250 words), giving a summary of the contents and major themes. (Note that this will ultimately be used by search engines, and it will form part of the meta-data that will be seen first by people searching your article.)

Keywords
Please list up to 10 keyword terms that accurately reflect the article.

Main body of text

List of abbreviations
If any abbreviations have been used, please define and list them accordingly under this heading.

End notes
Use endnotes rather than footnotes, for any additional notes and information. These appear at the end of the main text, before References. All notes should be used only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.

Acknowledgements
The Acknowledgements page mentions everyone whose contribution to the work you wish to recognise.

References/bibliography
A full references list should contain all the sources cited in the text.

Declarations and conflict of interests
Clearly state the following in the article:

• Consent from all authors for publication and their contributions
• Clearly declare any possible conflicts of interest, including but not limited to financial and non-financial competing interests. Where there are no conflicts of interests or competing interests, authors must clearly declare this under the same heading. For further information, please refer to the journal’s Editorial Policy.
• Ethics approval statement (where applicable)
• Consent for publication (where applicable)

Article types

Original research article
Original research articles are detailed studies reporting original research classified as primary literature.

Review article
Reviews provide critical and systematic appraisal of the current research to provide authoritative judgement to its particular context, topic, and field.

Book review
Book reviews are brief concise articles that provide an evaluation of a published scholarly book.

Book reviews are generally invited only, however suggestions are welcome and should be sent to the Editors of the journal. A book review might assess the importance of a book's contributions to a particular field covered by the journal’s aims and scope and should aim to objectively review the strengths and weaknesses that concern the journal’s audience. (Please refer to the journal’s aims and scope).

Special issues

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society welcomes proposals from Guest Editors for specific special issues. These special issues are themed and focused publications that fit within the overarching remit of the journal. Proposals are welcome from editors with a specialism in any relevant field.

All general enquiries should be made to the Editor at: p.swaab [at] ucl.ac.uk.