RaveBookforumWarner was a remarkable English writer ... Over the years, her reputation as a writer, along with her queerness, has been nearly rubbed out. That’s a mistake: In its style, form, insight, and quiet subversion, The Corner That Held Them is one of the finest novels of its time ... Throughout the novel, Warner’s singular irreverence is a pleasure to behold. There’s the convent’s less-than-illustrious founding, for example, as well as the insistence, all the way through, on economic affairs, rather than spiritual. Her point isn’t, quite, that the tedious is imbued with holiness, that the sacred is profane. Rather, the quotidian is, in fact, quotidian, and the sacred is quotidian, too ... Implicit in Warner’s novel is an argument of some subtlety and even subversion. No, history is not made by \'great men\'—nor is it composed solely of holocausts and plagues, though these certainly leave their stain. The nuns perform their chores and endure mundane frustrations with each other. Living, even living that devotes itself to the sacred, is mired in the banal ... Life goes on and on and then, eventually, abruptly, it ends.
