Black lives and peripatetic practice in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show and David Garnett’s The Sailor’s Return

Abstract

David Garnett’s The Sailor’s Return (1925) and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936) are highly significant for their engagement with Black characters’ walking practice, which becomes a means to explore, and circumscribe, their subjectivity. Garnett and Warner use the physical act of walking to examine their imbrication, as white, English writers, with the haunting legacies of enslavement and empire. The essay offers a reading of Tulip Gundemey in The Sailor’s Return and Caspar Rathbone in Summer Will Show to reveal how their peripatetic practice is imbued with negative, racialised affect, which is instrumental to each novel’s tragic conclusion. This in turn reiterates the complexity of Garnett and Warner’s ambivalent responses to racism and imperialism in their fiction, which are exacerbated by their positionality as white, Bloomsbury-affiliated writers active during the inter-war period.