Writer's statue approved for town centre

A clay maquette of the statue shows the writer sitting on the bench with Susie at her feet

Plans for a statue of a writer who spent most of her adult life in west Dorset have been given the go-ahead.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf and lived in Dorset with her long-term partner, Valentine Ackland in the early 20th Century.

The life-size statue, cast in bronze, will sit on a new public bench in South Street, Dorchester.

Dorchester councillor Les Fry said he believed it would cost around £60,000 to make and erect and welcomed the addition of a statue to a woman author associated with the area.

Sylvia Townsend Warner lived in Dorset with her partner, poet Valentine Ackland

In its planning application, Dorchester Civic Society said Sylvia Townsend Warner's career as a poet and writer spanned six decades.

It said: "Yet, despite her remarkable contributions, her name is rarely mentioned and remains absent from Dorset's literary landscape.

"Sylvia was a highly individual writer of novels, short stories and poems, and a contemporary of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes.

"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."

A computer-generated image shows the clay maquette of the statue on South Street, Dorset

The statue will be sculpted by Denise Dutton who created the Mary Anning statue in Lyme Regis.

It will feature a cat at the statue's feet, a reference to Townsend-Warner's love of cats. The figure itself has been modelled on Dorchester's famous Susie the Cat.

In the application for planning consent the society said the statue would help create "a more welcoming and distinctive open space… and will enhance the quality of Dorchester's environment for residents and visitors."

The society said the statue would be the town's first non-royal statue of a woman, joining the six statues of "worthy" men that Dorchester already has, including Thomas Hardy and William Barnes.