“War trod her low”: Recovery and Community in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Opus 7

Abstract

Set in the rural, fictional town of Love Green, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1931 long poem, Opus 7, offers readers a glimpse into daily life in interwar England. Through its protagonist, Rebecca Random, the poem reflects the innumerable shifts in the cultural category of womanhood that occurred as a result of the First World War. In so doing, it illuminates the extent to which women on the home front continued to negotiate their postwar roles and individual identities throughout the interwar period. Although this gradual reshaping of female identity presents an opportunity to claim economic independence, Rebecca’s troubled existence casts such opportunity as struggle. As I teach Opus 7, I employ the term “non-combatant trauma” to describe the nuances of such struggle, which has economic, psychological, emotional, and social dimensions.