About the journal
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.
- Aims and Scope
- What we publish
- Editorial process and Peer Review
- Acceptance criteria
- Open Access and Licensing
- Article publication charges (APCs)
- Discoverability and Indexing
- Journal metrics
- Journal Details
- Contact and Community
Aims and scope
The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is a peer reviewed, diamond 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 It features scholarly articles, previously unpublished archival works by Warner, and pieces by well-known contemporary writers describing their appreciation of Warner.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.
What we publish
We welcome a wide range of content formats, including:
- Research articles
- Review articles
- Book reviews
Find out more about how to format and submit to the journal in our Author Guidelines:
Author guidelines
Editorial process and Peer Review
The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society operates double anonymised peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, removed of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review.
Reviewers cannot be from the same institution as the author, based at any funding bodies connected to the paper and cannot be recommended by authors or anyone else connected to the paper. Author(s) 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 the UCL Press editorial policy pages (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/site/editorial_policy).
Acceptance criteria
We assess submissions based on:
- Relevance to our aims, scope and mission.
- Clarity and soundness of argument and findings.
- Evidence of new knowledge and meaningful contribution to the field.
- Responsiveness to reviewer and Editorial feedback.
Submissions are unlikely to be accepted if they:
- Are primarily commercial or self-promotional.
- Contain excessive self-citation.
- Lack clear conclusions or conceptual rigour.
- Provide minimal updates on prior work.
- Are not suitable for peer review due to clarity or fit with the journal.
Articles accepted for full publication will be those where the Editorial Board has received at least two favourable peer reviews and is satisfied that all reviewer and Editorial comments have been adequately addressed.
Experience suggests that few submissions are accepted after a single review round. The Editorial Board may decline a submission at any stage if reviewer concerns cannot be addressed to the Board’s satisfaction. In some cases, Editors may request revisions before peer review to support review effectiveness.
Preprints
The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Journal is happy to accept submissions of papers that have been loaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, have been presented at conferences, or other informal communication channels. These formats will not be deemed prior publication. Authors must retain copyright to such preprints and are encouraged to link any prior posting of their paper to the final published version within the journal, if it is editorially accepted.
Open Access and Licensing
All content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This ensures:
- Free access for readers worldwide.
- Retention of copyright by authors.
- Maximum flexibility for reuse, adaptation and sharing.
We follow the Budapest Open Access Initiative and are committed to author rights and open scholarship. Our Author Contributor Agreement outlines full terms for publication:
Author Contributor Agreement
Article publication charges (APCs)
The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is a Diamond Open Access journal, meaning that UCL Press does not levy any Article-Processing Charges (APCs) for submission or publication.
UCL Press covers all the costs to publishing every article and publishing is free at every stage:
- No submission fees
- No peer review fees
- No publication fees
This reflects our commitment to equity and non-profit publishing, especially for authors with limited funding or from underrepresented sectors.
Discoverability and Indexing
UCL Press works 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:
- Scopus
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Dimensions
- EBSCO
- Ulrichsweb
- OCLC
- Google Scholar
- Baidu
- Portico and CLOCKSS (for long-term preservation)
Journal metrics
We are committed to the responsible use of metrics and strongly encourage all readers, authors, reviewers, and Editors to read through our statement about the use of metrics across the journal, available online at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/site/editorial_policy/#METRICS.
Citation metrics
- Scopus CiteScore (2025) 0.3
- Scopus SJR (2025) not yet released
- Scopus SNIP (2025) not yet released
Journal Details
ISSN: 2398-0605
Publication frequency: one issue per year
Published by
UCL Press, University College London (UCL)
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Contact and Community
We are a community-led journal. Whether you’re submitting, reviewing, or simply reading, we invite you to be part of our network.
For pre-submission enquiries:
p.swaab [at] ucl.ac.uk
Stay connected:
Bluesky: @uclpressjournals.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ucl-press-journals