DORCHESTER'S first modern statue to a woman from the area's past is being proposed for a site in South Street.

An application for a statue to writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, with an information board explaining her contribution to society, has been lodged with Dorset Council for a site outside Goulds fashion store.

It has been proposed by Dorchester Civic Society on the site of the most northerly public bench in the area.

The Society say the life-sized statue, made from cast bronze will be mounted on a square bronze metal plate and will appear to be sat on a new bench, to be provided. A cat will be at the statue's feet, a reference to Townsend-Warner's love of cats, the animal figure modelled on Dorchester's famous Susie the Cat.

The writer last year won a public poll of women from the area who have been overlooked by history.

In its planning application the Society said : "Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific writer and poet whose career spanned six decades, producing some of the most varied, witty, and revolutionary work of her time. 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. 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"… Townsend Warner's personal life was just as remarkable as her literary achievements. She spent most of her adult life in West Dorset with poet Valentine Ackland, her long-term partner.

"At a time when same-sex relationships were heavily stigmatised, their partnership defied societal expectations, positioning both Townsend Warner and Ackland as pioneers for LGBTQ+ visibility and acceptance."

The Society say her statue will be the town's first non-royal statue of a woman, joining the six statues of 'worthy' men that Dorchester already has.

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

In the application for planning consent the Society say the statue will help create "a more welcoming and distinctive open space… (being) highly appropriate and will enhance the quality of Dorchester's environment for residents and visitors. It is significant that Whitbread are intending to develop a Premier Inn Hotel across South Street very near to the proposed statue. These two schemes will help create a new vibrancy and are mutually supportive."

Public comments on the proposal remain open until April 4th – reference P/FUL/2025/01150 on the Dorset Council website.