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Mr. Fortune

Mr. Fortune

by Sylvia Townsend Warner, introduction by Adam Mars-Jones

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Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature Fiction Literature in English
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After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune lights out for Fanua. Yet after three years, he has made only one convert, and his devotion to the boy may prove more sensual than sacred. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s second novel, is lyrical, droll, and deeply affecting, and her missionary captivated his creator as much as he did her readers.

Long after the book’s publication, Warner began the novella The Salutation. Now adrift and starving on the Brazilian pampas, Mr. Fortune is rescued by an elderly widow, who delights in having an Englishman about the house. Her heir, however, may beg to differ.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590174586
Pages: 248
Publication Date:

Praise

Her satire, so humorous, so warm, so finely feminine, has the depth and reach that brutally naturalistic rendition of a life-surface can never attain; and the fairy-like locale of her story, her impossible islanders, and her slightly mad, quixotic hero admit the entrance of beauty and wit....
—Clifton Fadiman

Her writing is full of melodic skills...[which allow] her rhythmically to evoke the speaking voice, so that the humdrum and the exotic can lie close alongside. Her sentences move like talk between intimates. Perhaps that is why this quizzical tale is so intensely moving.
—Gillian Beer, New Statesman

At long last I pulled down from its place on the shelves Sylvia Townsend Warner's plump little novel impishly titled Mr. Fortune's Maggot and was once again amazed by what a witty, poetic, clairvoyant writer this English woman was.
— John Updike

Original, elegant and hypnotically strange.
—Miranda Seymour, The New York Times

One of our most idiosyncratic, courageous and versatile writers.
—Hermione Lee

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