DORCHESTER'S first modern statue to a woman from the area's past has been agreed for a site in South Street.

The life-size statue will be to writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, cast in bronze, and will appear to sit on a new public bench.

The application was put forward last month and has been championed by Dorchester Civic Society and will feature a cat at the statue's feet, a reference to Townsend-Warner's love of cats, the figure itself 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.

Dorchester councillor Les Fry proposed accepting the statue at the area planning committee on Tuesday. He 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.

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

The Society application 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.

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 writing, spending most of her adult life in West Dorset with poet Valentine Ackland, her long-term partner at a time when same-sex relationships were stigmatised.

The Civic Society say the statue will 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.

The statue will be sculpted by Denise Dutton who created the recent 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."