On December 3rd, Mary Jacobs gave an apparently lighthearted and entertaining talk on the twenty-year long MI5 surveillance of writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her companion and lover Valentine Ackland. It was great fun to hear about the ludicrous mismatch between senior MI5 officers and local police investigating a couple of leftist literary women (members of the British Communist Party) living in remote rural Dorset. The information came from recently released MI5 archives. Despite the humour of class and lifestyle incomprehension, it was moving to learn of this radical writer's sustained and practical political commitment: working in Spain for the Red Cross during the Civil War, attending the congress of anti-Fascist writers there, and organising accommodation and financial help for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Mary's most recent article on Warner appears in the Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, she is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University and teaches Life Writing on the MA.
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