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Lolly Willowes
When Laura Willowes’s beloved father dies, she is absorbed in the household of her brother and his family. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces. For twenty years, Lolly is neither indulgent nor impulsive, until one day when she decides to move to a village in the Chilterns, much to her family’s chagrin.
But it’s in the countryside, among nature, where Lolly has her first taste of freedom. Duty-bound to no one except herself, she revels in the solitary life. When her nephew moves there, and Lolly feels once again thrust into her old familial role, she reaches out to the otherworldly, to the darkness, to the unheeded power within the hearts of women to feel at peace once more . . .
But it’s in the countryside, among nature, where Lolly has her first taste of freedom. Duty-bound to no one except herself, she revels in the solitary life. When her nephew moves there, and Lolly feels once again thrust into her old familial role, she reaches out to the otherworldly, to the darkness, to the unheeded power within the hearts of women to feel at peace once more . . .
222 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
About the author
Sylvia Townsend Warner
81 books320 followersSylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.
She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.
She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.
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May 25, 2011
This is a book about witches. But when I finally put this book down last night, I mostly just thought about my father.
I don’t think it is controversial to say that duty is a bit of an old fashioned word these days. Like honor. It’s one of those words you hear someone say and squirm uncomfortably, like you would if they said, “I’m hip to that,” without irony or asked where all the “hep cats” are partying while wearing a fedora. It’s not a word that works with a land of ironic t-shirts and Lady Gaga. But it is still around, and fashionable, in some places. The military is the first place that comes to mind. The Catholic church is another. The third is the lock-step, precedence obsessed Republican party that nominated John McCain. I grew up in a household defined by all three of these things, in a state that was defined by their opposites. It’s fair to say that “duty” was therefore the defining characteristic that seperated out my childhood from most of my friends. I don’t think I called it by that name then. Mostly I called it by the name “Catholic guilt,” with a knowing smile- that was the way to quickly explain it to friends who were mostly atheist and had, accordingly, sort of a romanticized horrid image of what that meant.
All of this came from my father. His defining characteristic is “duty”. I can’t think of a better way to describe it, and before I read Lolly Willowes, I didn’t have that word either. My dad is one of the best people I know. He always, unerringly, puts other people first. To a fault. He tries to be sensitive about other peoples’ opinions and feelings, always remembers occasions, and when you argue with him he makes you feel bad for disagreeing with him because his reasoning is always so moral and he’s clearly put time into formulating whatever opinion he’s going to give you, and he takes it seriously. As you can imagine, our political discussions did not (and still don’t) end well for me- I always end up sounding like a petulant child somehow and he’s still “father,” patient, kind, waiting for me to figure it out. Like “Aunt Lolly,” my dad strongly believes in his role as “father.” If he was in the middle of a conversation and all of a sudden my brother or I did something or said something that was wrong in any way, he would stop, put on the mask and say, “Now, Kelly, remember to be kind and…” like if he didn’t correct me for making fun of someone’s shoes I was going to turn out to be a bad person who kills kittens and it was going to be his fault somehow. If this makes him sound cold or distant- he wasn’t at all, he just had such a deeply ingrained sense of this duty that meant that what he should be doing always took priority. It was like a compulsion. He couldn’t help it.
As Lolly says, it might “all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust.” Because of the fine dust of the system of obligations he inherited from a generation wrapped up in values like Lolly’s, I really don’t think I officially met my dad as a person until I turned 21. Somehow, that age was like Aurora’s sixteenth birthday and triggered a magic spell that meant that “duty” could be relaxed a little- only a little, and only gradually, but it happened. The person I only saw in glimmers before that finally appeared. And you know what? He was kind of a cool dude. He was funny! He had some petty resentments! He knew about wine. He had favorite books, and used to love the Doors. His friends gave his car the nickname “Squirrel” in college and made fun of him for being unable to fix it.
I blame everything that Lolly Willowes rebels against in this book for the fact that I didn’t really meet my dad until four years ago. This book is about witches, but mostly my first wish was that my dad decided to be a warlock a long time ago. (Wow. There’s a sentence you don’t write every day.)
Lolly Willowes is about these ‘duties’, these obligations, the little things that are not bad in themselves, but accumulating year after year just crush the life out of the most vibrant of personalities. It is about people who become their roles and responsibilities, to the extent that they forget that they were ever anything else. Caroline, the wife of Lolly’s brother Henry is the embodiment of this trend. Described as the “married nun,” she is reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s cousin- whose highest value is order for no other reason but order’s sake. But what I loved about Warner’s depiction of this is that she doesn’t do this in an abstract way. She gets into the material aspect of the story- just like Clarissa Dalloway with her flowers and her dresses that need mending and the men who are “perfectly upholstered.” Warner captures a reality in the way that women and men living the lives they do would process emotions and ideas, through objects and customary expressions, and even further how these people don’t really understand what it is that they’re reacting to or why they say the things they do, except for custom, convention, and the lack of alternative to say anything else that would be acceptable. Lolly describes being at a ball where the biggest problem is not dancing with someone, but dancing with someone twice: one uses up all the commonplace conversation appropriate for acquaintances in the first dance, and then one has the obligation to say something different but in fact rather like the things one said in the first dance. Warner exquisitely captures the torture of wanting something different, something more, but being aware that anything “more” or “different” will only ensure that you find yourself completely shut out. And moreover, that you will feel bad about it yourself because you have failed in some way.
Being a person, in this world, is a failure. It is a failure to be always and ever living up to what one should be doing, which, after all, as Lolly achingly feels over and over again- isn’t such a problem when someone just wants you to wind the yarn, or just help mend this one sheet. But eventually the dust settles and Laura (who tries and tries again to emerge from behind Lolly) grows so tired of it that taking to her bed ill for two weeks is a blessed relief- all the understanding of her desire to do nothing (which is the only coded way she can express her real desire for independence) that would not have been there otherwise is hers. It offers even more understanding of the “fashionable” invalid of the era. There are few alternatives for a woman who desires to be independent but living on her own in a town of 200 people called Great Mop. But even then, she is not safe until she makes a deal with the devil.
Why must a woman imagine herself an agent of the embodiment of all evil only so she can take long walks and refuse to fetch and carry for others and not feel bad about any of it? The greatest gift that the devil gives Laura is the gift of watching her nephew in distress and not caring. Why should the devil be the only one to understand why this would be a gift? Warner explains this, a bit, to the reader at the end, but I do not think she needed to. It was in the way Laura shuddered when Caroline’s deepest feeling was revealed to have to do with Christ’s folded grave garments, it was in the way she saw a small, helpless kitten as the sign of her witchhood, in how she felt she had to give up the pretty flowers she bought for herself to Caroline’s living room and how she didn’t scream when her brothers left her tied to the tree as a child, but carried on singing and dreaming until her father found her that evening.
Warner has the ability to make the domestic magical, and the magical mundane and present. She’s better at this than most fantasy writers I’ve encountered, in fact. She’s able to be witty and understanding, warm and cutting, wise and wonderfully silly, in a way that few writers I’ve encountered outside of Austen and Woolf can. This is a book I want to read on a bench in a quiet park, in front of a fire in the winter, in bed with a mug of tea, in a bay window looking out on a rocky Maine coast. It made me smile and laugh, and when I put it down, it made me think until I went to sleep. This was just a book about a middle aged woman who moves to the country and becomes a cat lady with delusions about the devil. And I expect to be back to share those delusions with her many times in the future.
I didn't give this book five stars. But that was mostly because I think it would be too showy for Lolly Willowes. I think she would prefer to get four stars and find her visitors surprised into finding that she's worth every bit of five and more.
I don’t think it is controversial to say that duty is a bit of an old fashioned word these days. Like honor. It’s one of those words you hear someone say and squirm uncomfortably, like you would if they said, “I’m hip to that,” without irony or asked where all the “hep cats” are partying while wearing a fedora. It’s not a word that works with a land of ironic t-shirts and Lady Gaga. But it is still around, and fashionable, in some places. The military is the first place that comes to mind. The Catholic church is another. The third is the lock-step, precedence obsessed Republican party that nominated John McCain. I grew up in a household defined by all three of these things, in a state that was defined by their opposites. It’s fair to say that “duty” was therefore the defining characteristic that seperated out my childhood from most of my friends. I don’t think I called it by that name then. Mostly I called it by the name “Catholic guilt,” with a knowing smile- that was the way to quickly explain it to friends who were mostly atheist and had, accordingly, sort of a romanticized horrid image of what that meant.
All of this came from my father. His defining characteristic is “duty”. I can’t think of a better way to describe it, and before I read Lolly Willowes, I didn’t have that word either. My dad is one of the best people I know. He always, unerringly, puts other people first. To a fault. He tries to be sensitive about other peoples’ opinions and feelings, always remembers occasions, and when you argue with him he makes you feel bad for disagreeing with him because his reasoning is always so moral and he’s clearly put time into formulating whatever opinion he’s going to give you, and he takes it seriously. As you can imagine, our political discussions did not (and still don’t) end well for me- I always end up sounding like a petulant child somehow and he’s still “father,” patient, kind, waiting for me to figure it out. Like “Aunt Lolly,” my dad strongly believes in his role as “father.” If he was in the middle of a conversation and all of a sudden my brother or I did something or said something that was wrong in any way, he would stop, put on the mask and say, “Now, Kelly, remember to be kind and…” like if he didn’t correct me for making fun of someone’s shoes I was going to turn out to be a bad person who kills kittens and it was going to be his fault somehow. If this makes him sound cold or distant- he wasn’t at all, he just had such a deeply ingrained sense of this duty that meant that what he should be doing always took priority. It was like a compulsion. He couldn’t help it.
As Lolly says, it might “all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust.” Because of the fine dust of the system of obligations he inherited from a generation wrapped up in values like Lolly’s, I really don’t think I officially met my dad as a person until I turned 21. Somehow, that age was like Aurora’s sixteenth birthday and triggered a magic spell that meant that “duty” could be relaxed a little- only a little, and only gradually, but it happened. The person I only saw in glimmers before that finally appeared. And you know what? He was kind of a cool dude. He was funny! He had some petty resentments! He knew about wine. He had favorite books, and used to love the Doors. His friends gave his car the nickname “Squirrel” in college and made fun of him for being unable to fix it.
I blame everything that Lolly Willowes rebels against in this book for the fact that I didn’t really meet my dad until four years ago. This book is about witches, but mostly my first wish was that my dad decided to be a warlock a long time ago. (Wow. There’s a sentence you don’t write every day.)
Lolly Willowes is about these ‘duties’, these obligations, the little things that are not bad in themselves, but accumulating year after year just crush the life out of the most vibrant of personalities. It is about people who become their roles and responsibilities, to the extent that they forget that they were ever anything else. Caroline, the wife of Lolly’s brother Henry is the embodiment of this trend. Described as the “married nun,” she is reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s cousin- whose highest value is order for no other reason but order’s sake. But what I loved about Warner’s depiction of this is that she doesn’t do this in an abstract way. She gets into the material aspect of the story- just like Clarissa Dalloway with her flowers and her dresses that need mending and the men who are “perfectly upholstered.” Warner captures a reality in the way that women and men living the lives they do would process emotions and ideas, through objects and customary expressions, and even further how these people don’t really understand what it is that they’re reacting to or why they say the things they do, except for custom, convention, and the lack of alternative to say anything else that would be acceptable. Lolly describes being at a ball where the biggest problem is not dancing with someone, but dancing with someone twice: one uses up all the commonplace conversation appropriate for acquaintances in the first dance, and then one has the obligation to say something different but in fact rather like the things one said in the first dance. Warner exquisitely captures the torture of wanting something different, something more, but being aware that anything “more” or “different” will only ensure that you find yourself completely shut out. And moreover, that you will feel bad about it yourself because you have failed in some way.
Being a person, in this world, is a failure. It is a failure to be always and ever living up to what one should be doing, which, after all, as Lolly achingly feels over and over again- isn’t such a problem when someone just wants you to wind the yarn, or just help mend this one sheet. But eventually the dust settles and Laura (who tries and tries again to emerge from behind Lolly) grows so tired of it that taking to her bed ill for two weeks is a blessed relief- all the understanding of her desire to do nothing (which is the only coded way she can express her real desire for independence) that would not have been there otherwise is hers. It offers even more understanding of the “fashionable” invalid of the era. There are few alternatives for a woman who desires to be independent but living on her own in a town of 200 people called Great Mop. But even then, she is not safe until she makes a deal with the devil.
Why must a woman imagine herself an agent of the embodiment of all evil only so she can take long walks and refuse to fetch and carry for others and not feel bad about any of it? The greatest gift that the devil gives Laura is the gift of watching her nephew in distress and not caring. Why should the devil be the only one to understand why this would be a gift? Warner explains this, a bit, to the reader at the end, but I do not think she needed to. It was in the way Laura shuddered when Caroline’s deepest feeling was revealed to have to do with Christ’s folded grave garments, it was in the way she saw a small, helpless kitten as the sign of her witchhood, in how she felt she had to give up the pretty flowers she bought for herself to Caroline’s living room and how she didn’t scream when her brothers left her tied to the tree as a child, but carried on singing and dreaming until her father found her that evening.
Warner has the ability to make the domestic magical, and the magical mundane and present. She’s better at this than most fantasy writers I’ve encountered, in fact. She’s able to be witty and understanding, warm and cutting, wise and wonderfully silly, in a way that few writers I’ve encountered outside of Austen and Woolf can. This is a book I want to read on a bench in a quiet park, in front of a fire in the winter, in bed with a mug of tea, in a bay window looking out on a rocky Maine coast. It made me smile and laugh, and when I put it down, it made me think until I went to sleep. This was just a book about a middle aged woman who moves to the country and becomes a cat lady with delusions about the devil. And I expect to be back to share those delusions with her many times in the future.
I didn't give this book five stars. But that was mostly because I think it would be too showy for Lolly Willowes. I think she would prefer to get four stars and find her visitors surprised into finding that she's worth every bit of five and more.
December 31, 2012
Sylvia Townsend Warner, London, 1920s
When we meet Laura Willowes in the opening pages of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes (pub. 1926), her sister-in-law Caroline is distractedly offering for Laura to live in London with herself and Laura’s brother Henry, following the death of Laura’s father:
“Caroline spoke affectionately, but her thoughts were elsewhere. They had already journeyed back to London to buy an eiderdown for the bed in the small spare-room. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fire-place? Perhaps a bureau would be better, because of the extra drawers? Yes, that was it. Lolly could bring the little walnut bureau with the false handles on one side and the top that jumped up when you touched the spring by the ink-well. It had belonged to Lolly’s mother, and Lolly had always used it, so Sibyl could not raise any objections. Sibyl had no claim to it whatever, really. She had only been married to James for two years, and if the bureau had marked the morning-room wall-paper, she could easily put something else in its place. A stand with ferns and potted plants would look very nice.”
With this opening, Townsend Warner establishes some key concerns: the disposition of single women as if they were furniture, the strong convention that single women needed to live under the care of a male guardian, and the conviction that this convention subsumed the wishes of any individual woman. Townsend Warner’s approach to exploring these themes is extraordinary, and therein lies the power of the novel. She structures Laura’s story to carry her readers along with Laura’s awakening to her own desires and powers. She does so with a deep understanding of the power of social conventions, a wry sense of humor, and the ability to express is beautiful, wild prose the powers of nature and Laura’s relationship to the land on a deep, almost primeval level. I emerged from this novel with a new favorite literary character, and a deep appreciation of Townsend Warner’s considerable skills as a writer and a social critic.
Townsend Warner clearly establishes the Willowes as a conservative family. Their beliefs and preferences were not the only ones present in England in 1902, but they were strongly held, and not only by the Willowes. And Laura, brought up in these traditions, is at first passive in the face of them:
“Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best.
“The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behavior imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.”
Laura’s individuality is absorbed by her family. Even her name is changed to Lolly when one of her nieces cannot pronounce “Laura,” after which no one in her family calls her Laura again. Townsend Warner presents Laura as satisfied with her life with her father, where she takes on the role of housekeeper after her mother’s death. She carries out her life to the rhythm of family traditions and the customs of the village. And she even follows her own version of her father’s trade in brewing:
“Botany and brewery she now combined into one pursuit, for at the spur of Nannie’s rhyme she turned her attention into the forsaken green byways of the rural pharmacopeia. From Everard [her father] she got a little still, from the family recipe-books much information and good advice; and where these failed her, Nicholas Culpepper or old Goody Andrews, who might have been Nicholas’s crony by the respect she had for the moon, were ready to help her out. She roved the countryside for herbs and simples, and many were the washes and decoctions that she made from sweet-gale, water purslane, cowslips, and the roots of succory, while her salads gathered in fields and hedges were eaten by Everard, at first in hope and trust, and afterwards with flattering appetite. Encouraged by him, she even wrote a little book called “Health by the Wayside” commending the use of old-fashioned simples and healing herbs. It was published anonymously at the local press, and fell quite flat.”
After her father’s death, Laura’s caretaker role is shifted from dutiful daughter to irreplaceable aunt. Townsend Warner depicts her as much loved, but greatly constrained in her life in London. Once it becomes clear to Caroline and Henry that Laura will never marry, Caroline resigns herself to sitting with Laura by her side for the rest of her life:
“Caroline resigned herself to spending the rest of her evenings with Laura beside her. The perpetual company of a sister-in-law was rather more than she had bargained for. Still, there she was, and Henry was right—they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself. It was not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for herself. A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline’s thoughts. She did not attach an inordinate value to her wifehood and maternity; they were her duties, rather than her glories. But for all that she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. It was well to be loved, to be necessary to other people. But Laura too was loved, and Laura was necessary. Caroline did not know what the children would do without their Aunt Lolly.”
Although Laura is filling an established social role, she grows more and more dissatisfied with her position. Townsend Warner captures this growing sense of longing masterfully -- and by couching them in terms of landscape and nature, she provides a strong counterpoint to Laura’s domesticated life in front of her brother’s fireplace:
“At these times she was subject to a peculiar kind of day-dreaming, so vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace. She did not recall the places which she had visited in holiday-time, these reproached her like opportunities neglected. But while her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely seaboards, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood. She never imagined herself in these places by daylight. She never thought of them as being in any way beautiful. It was not beauty at all that she wanted, or, depressed though she was, she would have bought a ticket to somewhere or other upon the Metropolitan railway and gone out to see the recumbent autumnal graces of the countryside. Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.”
The sole outlet for Laura’s desires remains the flowers she buys, even in the winter, to fill up her room, a habit in which she persists although Caroline quietly views it as a terrible extravagance. One day, when running an errand, Laura is drawn to a display of preserves from the county and chrysanthemums. As she looks at them, she falls into a revery that seems both to point to her country past and to look ahead to a future in a solitary orchard:
“Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.
"As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.”
Laura learns from the shopkeeper that the mums and preserves came from Buckinghamshire. This leads her to purchase a guidebook for The Chilterns, where she first learns of the existence of the village of Great Mop. Its walking paths, Norman church, and nearby windmill capture Laura’s imagination, so she decides to move there, to her family’s shock and strong disapproval. Throughout this section, there remains a sense of something unseen and mystical driving Laura on to a future she had not articulated earlier, even to herself.
Autumn, The Chilterns
Throughout the rest of the novel, Townsend Warner evokes the wild majesty of the land surrounding Great Mop. As Laura goes on long solitary walks through the lanes, fields, and forests, she opens up more and more to the wilderness around her, and in doing so, taps into a piece of herself that had remained buried until then. Laura also becomes aware of a darker power surrounding her.
Autumn, The Ridgeway, The Chilterns
“All one day the wind had risen, and late in the evening it called her out. She went up to the top of Cubbey Ridge, past the ruined windmill that clattered with its torn sails. When she had come to the top of the Ridge she stopped, with difficulty holding herself upright. She felt the wind swoop down close to the earth. The moon was out hunting overhead, her pack of black and white hounds ranged over the sky. Moon and wind and clouds hunted an invisible quarry. The wind routed through the woods. Laura from the hill-top heard the different voices. The spent gusts left the beech-hangers throbbing like sea caverns through which the wave had passed; the fir plantation seemed to chant some never-ending rune.
"Listening to these voices, another voice came to her ear—the far-off pulsation of a goods train laboring up a steep cutting. It was scarcely audible, more perceptible as feeling than as sound, but by its regularity it dominated all the other voices. It seemed to come nearer and nearer, to inform her like the drumming of blood in her ears. She began to feel defenseless, exposed to the possibility of an overwhelming terror. She listened intently, trying not to think. Though the noise came from an ordinary goods train, no amount of reasoning could stave off this terror. She must yield herself, yield up all her attention, if she would escape. It was a wicked sound. It expressed something eternally outcast and reprobated by man, stealthily trafficking by night, unseen in the dark clefts of the hills. Loud, separate, and abrupt, each pant of the engine trampled down her wits. The wind and the moon and the ranging cloud pack were not the only hunters abroad that night: something else was hunting among the hills, hunting slowly, deliberately, sure of its quarry.”
Autumn, The Chilterns
Townsend Warner’s depiction of Laura’s slow transformation is masterful. Her prose is beautiful and dangerous and wild. The reader pieces together hints and whispers of the secrets of the power held in the trees and fields of The Chilterns. I will leave it up to you to discover these secrets along with Laura. In the end, if you follow where Townsend Warner is leading you, you will explore themes related to power and autonomy, the deep connections possible between a place and a person who is open to undomesticated beauty, and the life possible for a woman who refuses to be constrained by convention and tradition, but who looks inside herself to determine how to live.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
February 14, 2017
Warner’s prose sparkles and snaps like a gin and tonic in an elegant cut glass tumbler, her humor the slice of lime contributing the essential dash of sharp acidity. Warner proves to be a most devious hostess, however: seemingly invited to a pleasantly amusing afternoon garden party, it is only as the sun begins to set that it slowly begins to dawn—this is actually a Witch’s Sabbath! What a marvelously devious sleight of hand.
And perhaps more than ever 2017 is the time for stories about waking up from the drowsiness of lives cocooned by social expectations and respectability politics and be pointed toward modes of being that are idiosyncratically imagined and intentionally pursued. Part 1 is all charming, "quintessentially" English eccentricities—a broad assortment of kooky extended family members, whimsical family heirlooms hoarded in drawing rooms, teatime and other daily rituals, and the like; this is the life of one Laura Willowes, quietly sloughed into a life of genteel spinsterhood, and cloistered in the tiny spare room in a brother’s family home in London. She slowly transforms into docile “Aunt Lolly” after being christened as such by a baby niece—her identity is so nondescript that even she doesn’t quite register her very name is no longer her own.
This all changes when an otherwise inauspicious guide book makes its way into Laura’s possession. Suddenly Part 2 sets off in an unforeseen direction as Laura announces she will be moving to the isolated rural village that is the subject of her new book. Her family attempts all means at their disposal—including emotional blackmail and financial threats—to undermine her resolve; she nevertheless persists and promptly lets a room of her own, ready to begin a new life distinctly, if somewhat tentatively, her own.
If this was the story of Lolly Willowes, it would still be of note as a showcase for Warner’s remarkable facility with language and sinuous approach to syntax; it's additionally exceptional as an early feminist fable making a persuasive and poignant case for female agency (Warner’s novel predates Woolf’s landmark A Room of One's Own by several years). But the author envisions much, much more for her text and hurtles headlong into the utterly startling Part 3. While I suspect most readers will know, as I did, the general trajectory of the narrative, I think the less known the better so will leave it at that. What a lovely defense of demanding and then enacting a life lived fully and deliciously and—take the term in whatever sense you prefer—queerly too.
“Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her, just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not remembered to use either.”
[Cross posted review from my blog Queer Modernisms.]
And perhaps more than ever 2017 is the time for stories about waking up from the drowsiness of lives cocooned by social expectations and respectability politics and be pointed toward modes of being that are idiosyncratically imagined and intentionally pursued. Part 1 is all charming, "quintessentially" English eccentricities—a broad assortment of kooky extended family members, whimsical family heirlooms hoarded in drawing rooms, teatime and other daily rituals, and the like; this is the life of one Laura Willowes, quietly sloughed into a life of genteel spinsterhood, and cloistered in the tiny spare room in a brother’s family home in London. She slowly transforms into docile “Aunt Lolly” after being christened as such by a baby niece—her identity is so nondescript that even she doesn’t quite register her very name is no longer her own.
This all changes when an otherwise inauspicious guide book makes its way into Laura’s possession. Suddenly Part 2 sets off in an unforeseen direction as Laura announces she will be moving to the isolated rural village that is the subject of her new book. Her family attempts all means at their disposal—including emotional blackmail and financial threats—to undermine her resolve; she nevertheless persists and promptly lets a room of her own, ready to begin a new life distinctly, if somewhat tentatively, her own.
If this was the story of Lolly Willowes, it would still be of note as a showcase for Warner’s remarkable facility with language and sinuous approach to syntax; it's additionally exceptional as an early feminist fable making a persuasive and poignant case for female agency (Warner’s novel predates Woolf’s landmark A Room of One's Own by several years). But the author envisions much, much more for her text and hurtles headlong into the utterly startling Part 3. While I suspect most readers will know, as I did, the general trajectory of the narrative, I think the less known the better so will leave it at that. What a lovely defense of demanding and then enacting a life lived fully and deliciously and—take the term in whatever sense you prefer—queerly too.
“Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her, just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not remembered to use either.”
[Cross posted review from my blog Queer Modernisms.]
July 25, 2021
I can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it was more of a shoulda coulda woulda.
This posh family gives up trying to marry off daughter Laura so she stays at home looking after dear widower Daddy until she is 28 when he pops his clogs. After that she is effortlessly absorbed into her brother’s family as a Useful Aunt to perform child minding and doily re-arranging tasks and pretend to enjoy ghastly conversations at miserable dinner parties for twenty years. Inside she is in a state of carpet chewing agony, she is suffocating, drowning, dying, and one day she can’t take it any more and she ups and announces she wants to go and live all alone in a teeny village nobody has heard of.
So this novel can be set alongside The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair and Skylark by Deszo Kosztolayni, for instance, but the difference is that the casual oppression is mixed with a big basketful of complete silliness. We have a witches sabbath (this turns out to consist of folk dancing) and we have friendly chats with Satan, the Evil One, re-configured as the Cosy One. . If you sell this Satan your soul he will attack your enemies with curdled milk and wasps, he will ensure they put on their jumpers the wrong way round and inside out and that they stub their toe on the way to bed and the wrong newspapers get delivered to their house occasionally. You can imagine Miss Willowes knitting this particular Satan a cardigan for the winter months
And plus, it didn’t seem to make sense that to complete her rejection of the cloying overbearing insufferable men of her family Miss Willowes would find it necessary to place herself in the power of another big strong male figure.
Robert McCrum included Lolly Willowes in his book The 100 Best Novels in English. Now, for sure, Lolly Willowes is a shoo-in for The 100 Most Charming Oddities in English but one of the all time best? I think Satan must have been messing with Mr McCrumb’s brain.
This posh family gives up trying to marry off daughter Laura so she stays at home looking after dear widower Daddy until she is 28 when he pops his clogs. After that she is effortlessly absorbed into her brother’s family as a Useful Aunt to perform child minding and doily re-arranging tasks and pretend to enjoy ghastly conversations at miserable dinner parties for twenty years. Inside she is in a state of carpet chewing agony, she is suffocating, drowning, dying, and one day she can’t take it any more and she ups and announces she wants to go and live all alone in a teeny village nobody has heard of.
So this novel can be set alongside The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair and Skylark by Deszo Kosztolayni, for instance, but the difference is that the casual oppression is mixed with a big basketful of complete silliness. We have a witches sabbath (this turns out to consist of folk dancing) and we have friendly chats with Satan, the Evil One, re-configured as the Cosy One. . If you sell this Satan your soul he will attack your enemies with curdled milk and wasps, he will ensure they put on their jumpers the wrong way round and inside out and that they stub their toe on the way to bed and the wrong newspapers get delivered to their house occasionally. You can imagine Miss Willowes knitting this particular Satan a cardigan for the winter months
And plus, it didn’t seem to make sense that to complete her rejection of the cloying overbearing insufferable men of her family Miss Willowes would find it necessary to place herself in the power of another big strong male figure.
Robert McCrum included Lolly Willowes in his book The 100 Best Novels in English. Now, for sure, Lolly Willowes is a shoo-in for The 100 Most Charming Oddities in English but one of the all time best? I think Satan must have been messing with Mr McCrumb’s brain.
March 1, 2021
A strange little book, Lolly Willowes is not what I thought it was going to be at all. I was more intrigued by the first and second parts which dealt with the life Laura Willowes leads, first as a housekeeper and companion for her father, after the death of her mother and then by her forced move to her oldest brother's house where she becomes a companion and helper to her sister-in-law. She is not allowed any freedom of her own, even when they go on vacation, Aunt Lolly, as the children call her, can not even take a walk by herself, she must be on hand to watch the children.
At around 40, this burdensome existence is strangling Lolly as she decides to move away from her brother's family and be on her own. Henry, her brother, vehemently disagrees with her plans, for some selfish reasons of his own, not wanting to admit, he's not such a great business man. Lolly finally gets her way, only to be smothered with her grown nephew, Titus, who decides to move to the same small village. She must scream into the wilderness at this invasion of her seclusion and serenity. This primal holler evokes a response from the nether world.
At around 40, this burdensome existence is strangling Lolly as she decides to move away from her brother's family and be on her own. Henry, her brother, vehemently disagrees with her plans, for some selfish reasons of his own, not wanting to admit, he's not such a great business man. Lolly finally gets her way, only to be smothered with her grown nephew, Titus, who decides to move to the same small village. She must scream into the wilderness at this invasion of her seclusion and serenity. This primal holler evokes a response from the nether world.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 19, 2016
It's like Barbara Pym started this story, left it unfinished, and then it was discovered by a manic Satanist who scribbled the rest of it all in one night. I totally enjoyed it, but what a hot mess.
July 10, 2021
Un libro extraño pero encantador y con un alegato feminista final para enmarcar
September 10, 2021
3.5 stars, rounded up.
Lolly Willowes is an odd little book. I found it a bit delightful in the beginning, but midway through it changes direction and becomes almost another kind of tale. Of the second half, I admit to not being smitten, but in fairness to Sylvia Townsend Warner, she does foreshadow that darker things are coming:
So when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks (with a crushed red geranium) and had bent over the greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank showed only a dark, shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in the old holy painting that hung in the dining room and was called the Leonardo.
There is a darkness in Lolly Willowes that is almost a mirror image of a holy lady, with everything backward and reversed. Even in her darker passages, Townsend Warner maintains a light, almost frivolous tone, and it is this tone perhaps that temporarily masks the fact that Warner is, in fact, dealing with a very serious issue.
Laura “Lolly” Willowes is a twenty-eight year old spinster. She has been raised indulgently by her father, and cares for him in his last days, so her insignificance and lack of freedom does not impress itself upon her until his passing, when she is relegated to the role of the spinster aunt in her brother’s household.
And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best.
Lolly accepts her fate for years, but there is a desire in her to be free, and she rebels against the behavior she sees in her sister-in-law, Caroline, who yielded to Henry’s judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices. That desire for more independence eventually comes into its own, and from that moment this novel becomes an early anthem to feminism.
The manner in which Lolly becomes a free being is unique and unorthodox. I tried to imagine how it would have been received by her original audience in 1926, to no avail. She seems to be saying that the caging of women by men makes any alternative preferable and no price too costly.
Lolly tells us that she does what she does, to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts.. And, we applaud her while wondering why such an extreme must be necessary in order to obtain the smallest, simplest freedom--the freedom to live ordinary days in your own chosen way, the freedom to enjoy the life you are given.
When I closed the last page of this seemingly light, carefree fantasy, I realized I had read one of the most scathing condemnations of a male dominated society I had ever come across. Perhaps Townsend Warner, like her character, was deceptively gentle, while truly being, as Lolly contends of all women, “how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are.”
Most currently pertinent quote (I’m positive I know this man):
He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to everyone who supported a better case than he.
For sheer lovely, descriptive writing:
The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall.
For humor mixed with pathos:
During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I’ll go to my grave now,” and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her.
Lolly Willowes is an odd little book. I found it a bit delightful in the beginning, but midway through it changes direction and becomes almost another kind of tale. Of the second half, I admit to not being smitten, but in fairness to Sylvia Townsend Warner, she does foreshadow that darker things are coming:
So when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks (with a crushed red geranium) and had bent over the greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank showed only a dark, shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in the old holy painting that hung in the dining room and was called the Leonardo.
There is a darkness in Lolly Willowes that is almost a mirror image of a holy lady, with everything backward and reversed. Even in her darker passages, Townsend Warner maintains a light, almost frivolous tone, and it is this tone perhaps that temporarily masks the fact that Warner is, in fact, dealing with a very serious issue.
Laura “Lolly” Willowes is a twenty-eight year old spinster. She has been raised indulgently by her father, and cares for him in his last days, so her insignificance and lack of freedom does not impress itself upon her until his passing, when she is relegated to the role of the spinster aunt in her brother’s household.
And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best.
Lolly accepts her fate for years, but there is a desire in her to be free, and she rebels against the behavior she sees in her sister-in-law, Caroline, who yielded to Henry’s judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices. That desire for more independence eventually comes into its own, and from that moment this novel becomes an early anthem to feminism.
The manner in which Lolly becomes a free being is unique and unorthodox. I tried to imagine how it would have been received by her original audience in 1926, to no avail. She seems to be saying that the caging of women by men makes any alternative preferable and no price too costly.
Lolly tells us that she does what she does, to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts.. And, we applaud her while wondering why such an extreme must be necessary in order to obtain the smallest, simplest freedom--the freedom to live ordinary days in your own chosen way, the freedom to enjoy the life you are given.
When I closed the last page of this seemingly light, carefree fantasy, I realized I had read one of the most scathing condemnations of a male dominated society I had ever come across. Perhaps Townsend Warner, like her character, was deceptively gentle, while truly being, as Lolly contends of all women, “how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are.”
Most currently pertinent quote (I’m positive I know this man):
He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to everyone who supported a better case than he.
For sheer lovely, descriptive writing:
The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall.
For humor mixed with pathos:
During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I’ll go to my grave now,” and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her.
March 8, 2013
“Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘Now! Now!’ it said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from the trees that it might stare at her more imperiously.”
The book started off well-enough. It tells the story of Laura Willowes (“Lolly”), a very independent aging spinster (I dislike that word but that’s the word they use in the book) who lives in England with her brother and his family. Because she’s single, her family try to control her but it’s obvious that Lolly is very headstrong.
I thought the book was going to focus more on her trials as a spinster in the 1920s England. It did to some extent but it took such an odd, unexpected turn towards the end when Lolly moves away to a little hamlet and then realizes that she’s a witch. I didn’t really feel as though the story had developed sufficiently in that direction to make me believe that incident was credible.
I read somewhere that there are clues all along that she’s a witch: she likes flowers so much, makes herbal infusions and likes wandering in fields. In that case, I must be a witch too then. I found those assumptions to be a bit stereotypical, but maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. I guess the following quote also alludes to the fact that Lolly was missing something in her life: “Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds and ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness- these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.”
Despite that, I did enjoy Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing style; it was very poetic and also witty at times. I liked the descriptions of the English countryside, she described it beautifully. I also liked how Laura came into her own, realized she didn’t have to live with her family but could survive very well on her own. And the fact that a female writer in the 1920s wrote a book that featured some magical realism is quite amazing. However, I can only give this one 3-stars.
The book started off well-enough. It tells the story of Laura Willowes (“Lolly”), a very independent aging spinster (I dislike that word but that’s the word they use in the book) who lives in England with her brother and his family. Because she’s single, her family try to control her but it’s obvious that Lolly is very headstrong.
I thought the book was going to focus more on her trials as a spinster in the 1920s England. It did to some extent but it took such an odd, unexpected turn towards the end when Lolly moves away to a little hamlet and then realizes that she’s a witch. I didn’t really feel as though the story had developed sufficiently in that direction to make me believe that incident was credible.
I read somewhere that there are clues all along that she’s a witch: she likes flowers so much, makes herbal infusions and likes wandering in fields. In that case, I must be a witch too then. I found those assumptions to be a bit stereotypical, but maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. I guess the following quote also alludes to the fact that Lolly was missing something in her life: “Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds and ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness- these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.”
Despite that, I did enjoy Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing style; it was very poetic and also witty at times. I liked the descriptions of the English countryside, she described it beautifully. I also liked how Laura came into her own, realized she didn’t have to live with her family but could survive very well on her own. And the fact that a female writer in the 1920s wrote a book that featured some magical realism is quite amazing. However, I can only give this one 3-stars.
January 15, 2022
January 2022: Re-read
2020:
Just my kind of snarky lit.
2020:
Just my kind of snarky lit.
July 2, 2022
роман про жінку, яка хотіла, щоб її лишили у спокої, але надворі були 1920-ті, тому з оточенням про це домовитися не вийшло, довелося домовлятись із сатаною. totally worth it.
December 30, 2015
I am deathly allergic to witty foreplay of the never ending sort. In more detailed terms, this is a category comprised of works written in the very worst vein of Austen, all fluffy gilt and jocular surface with none of said author's craft or deep meditation on human pathos. Now, Lolly Willowes did have some variation to its name, but when one begins with family lineage and ends with bantering dialogue and leaves little to gnaw upon between the two, it all comes off as very English. Much like works by white males, there's a lot of English type stuff glutting the literature realms, so if one wants to be good, one must be very, very, very good. You see, it's a matter of dilution, and not much can be done if a work runs headlong into losing itself in the crowd.
There's a tool of online fanfiction known more so by Mary Sue and less so by Gary Stu that, in short, makes deus ex machina a character type. Much like everything most associated with young women, it is popular target of public detraction, reasons spanning from poor writing style to the absurdity that a girl could ever accomplish anything worthwhile that was not inherently tied up with romance. Now, while I believe it is a valuable way for a much belittled demographic to hone both their penning skills and self-confidence in as free a way as the Internet affords (it's how I acquired the claws I stretch so nicely today), I do not conscientiously seek it out. Sometimes I am in the wrong for not doing so, but here is an instance wherein I was right, for an overt focus on the supreme ability of the titular Lolly Willowes led to number of peeves such as lack of cohesiveness, Great and Powerful Themes attempted through small and trivial circumstances, flawed appeal to the universal, and telling, telling, telling. Magical omniscience in a human character is all very well, but the utmost certainty that is never countered or translated into self-reflexivity does not feed my desire for development. In literature, I will always pass over the path of stagnant entitlement for that of pain; it's far more interesting that way.
In short, I came here looking for a kinswoman to Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and found something very nice, very cute, and ultimately not what I needed. Satan and hints of lesbians there were, but not enough of either to call forth the confounding depths of mental re-calibration I crave when such topics are touched upon. I'm sure this will appeal to others despite my lackluster words, for not all have my difficult standards when it comes to paroxysms of insatiable glee.
There's a tool of online fanfiction known more so by Mary Sue and less so by Gary Stu that, in short, makes deus ex machina a character type. Much like everything most associated with young women, it is popular target of public detraction, reasons spanning from poor writing style to the absurdity that a girl could ever accomplish anything worthwhile that was not inherently tied up with romance. Now, while I believe it is a valuable way for a much belittled demographic to hone both their penning skills and self-confidence in as free a way as the Internet affords (it's how I acquired the claws I stretch so nicely today), I do not conscientiously seek it out. Sometimes I am in the wrong for not doing so, but here is an instance wherein I was right, for an overt focus on the supreme ability of the titular Lolly Willowes led to number of peeves such as lack of cohesiveness, Great and Powerful Themes attempted through small and trivial circumstances, flawed appeal to the universal, and telling, telling, telling. Magical omniscience in a human character is all very well, but the utmost certainty that is never countered or translated into self-reflexivity does not feed my desire for development. In literature, I will always pass over the path of stagnant entitlement for that of pain; it's far more interesting that way.
In short, I came here looking for a kinswoman to Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and found something very nice, very cute, and ultimately not what I needed. Satan and hints of lesbians there were, but not enough of either to call forth the confounding depths of mental re-calibration I crave when such topics are touched upon. I'm sure this will appeal to others despite my lackluster words, for not all have my difficult standards when it comes to paroxysms of insatiable glee.
August 18, 2023
To amuse herself she had cut the dough into likenesses of the village people. Curious developments took place in the baking.
On one hand this is delightfully odd, gesturing to the literary tradition of English eccentrics. But, on another, there's a heartfelt and important message here about what it costs for a woman - middle aged, middle class, with a depleted private income - to find some space in which she is free from familial and societal expectations, a place to be herself, solitary if that's what she wants: A Room of One’s Own, indeed, as Virginia Woolf was to put it three years after this book was published.
I was immediately struck by Townsend Warner's ability to switch tones: from Austen-alike social comedy to a quasi-mystical sublimation in the natural world to a frantic, anxious, almost neurotic sense of being hunted, to an imaginative dream-like, surreal state that ends the book.
Along the way, there are intertexts aplenty - I was especially surprised to find objects and landscapes given sentient feelings and even voices, something I associate with Katherine Mansfield. But this also looks forward to writers like Angela Carter (especially her subversive gendered takes on fairy tales and folk tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories) and even Han Kang's The Vegetarian. And Townsend Warner can be hilarious: fending off a suitor by discussing werewolves in February had me laughing out loud!
Even more impressive is the way that the prose is woven through with imagery creating a whole subtext of figurative meanings: 'When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding a universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks of a holly leaf', and 'He loved the countryside as if it were a body.' The first gestures towards male mythic gods creating worlds where the Latin fingere, 'to mould, to create, to form' is often the verb used just as it is when Pygmalion creates the most beautiful female statue who he prays to be converted into his ideal, adoring woman - a woman of his own creation. The latter playfully recalls the stereotype of the witchy crone. And it's worth noting the trees and plants mentioned throughout the text: the willow, for example, which has sacred properties in druidic lore but which also reminded me of Viola's 'willow cabin' speech in Twelfth Night declaimed to Olivia and implicitly comparing female erotic desire with male modes of making love.
But for all the qualities I adored in this book, I found the whole witchcraft = female power equation problematic. I actively dislike the way it appears as a trope in so much historical fiction and even if we don't read this literally in the book, if we see it as a fantasising and desire, it's still the case that the identity of being a witch is one used historically to capture, torture, imprison and execute women, not liberate them. It's another role into which women can be squeezed by a controlling patriarchy. It's the face of the crone in the classical tripartite idea of womanhood (maiden, mother, crone) so that women are defined by their sexual state and relationship to men: the virgin/maiden, the wife/mother, the withered woman/widow. While I appreciate that stereotypes can be appropriated, owned and re-configured, I'm less sure about that happening here: for me, Lolly/Laura doesn't so much free herself through all that witch imagining as put herself into a different box but in the same ideological system. It's confusing, too, that witchcraft isn't even confined to women: there are warlocks at the witches Sabbath scene.
With traces of her radical politics (STW was an active member of the Communist Party), of possible queer desire, and the underpinning of a need, however gently expressed in Lolly/Laura, to decide what her own life should look like, this is a subversive narrative - and a sparkling, funny one. I love Townsend Warner's prose and slippery, unexpected sentences - and the way she has created a text that both charms and, especially when it was published in 1926, challenges.
February 1, 2019
I whole heartedly support the underlying philosophy or driving force of this book - proving a woman should have space of her own, a vote, a life, even if she deigns to stay single, etc. But the way the story is told deflates the message, from a three part structure that follows
1)agonizingly slow
2)feisty pseudo feminist
3)batshit crazy witchcraft (well this was a surprise)
This was the first book every offered by Book of the Month back in the day, so I enjoyed it from that curiosity standpoint, but there are stronger books of the same era that have similar themes.
Gold star for me, reading a book from my shelves.
And after I bought it but before I read it, I heard this book mentioned in passing on the Backlisted Podcast about "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," as an example of when witchcraft is used as a foil to show something about society, or something like that. Shirley Jackson is a much better writer, read her instead.
1)agonizingly slow
2)feisty pseudo feminist
3)batshit crazy witchcraft (well this was a surprise)
This was the first book every offered by Book of the Month back in the day, so I enjoyed it from that curiosity standpoint, but there are stronger books of the same era that have similar themes.
Gold star for me, reading a book from my shelves.
And after I bought it but before I read it, I heard this book mentioned in passing on the Backlisted Podcast about "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," as an example of when witchcraft is used as a foil to show something about society, or something like that. Shirley Jackson is a much better writer, read her instead.
November 21, 2021
This intriguing and seemingly light novel was first published in 1926. Laura Willowes is first a companion to her father and then after his death goes to her brothers household, Aunt Lolly is how she is known from then on. Once the children have grown up she decides to make a break and live on her own in the country. What a shock to the upright family types! A woman wanting to live her own life! So yes a feminist novel and while the final third is quite strange and didn’t quite work for me (I didn’t see why being a witch meant Satanism), it was a satisfying read. I felt so glad that Laura got rid of her annoying nephew! The writing is quite lovely and so cleverly scathing of some of the men in the book. I must find more of this authors books, why have I not heard of her?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2021
Charming and beautifully written. The story itself is frustrating, as all womans lives were in the 20s, and the result of that is a great theory where they give their souls to satan. That seems kind of silly, but considering when this was written it is logical that this should happen. Maybe if this story were written now, she would not have to pass from her father to her brother, to satan, but just to own herself, but that just shows how times change. I will definetly be reading more of Silvia Townsend Warner. This book was a joy to read.
May 30, 2020
I’m not sure what I expected to happen in this novel, but whatever it was, I didn’t get it. I don’t want to say what I did get, because even though the clues are there, it’s best to come upon it, as the title character does, with an anticipation of autumn, by an old warehouse, or in a clearing, or in the woods, or near a Folly.
If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about. This is my first Sylvia Townsend Warner, but if you know her other writing, perhaps you can guess what I mean. If you don’t want to read the book and want to know what I mean, it’s there in the first line of at least one Goodreads review. I rarely give reading advice, but I don’t recommend looking at that review if you plan on reading this. Whatever you do, as per usual, read the introduction after the novel.
Like the way Laura (Lolly) feels about autumn, the payoff is worth the anticipation.
If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about. This is my first Sylvia Townsend Warner, but if you know her other writing, perhaps you can guess what I mean. If you don’t want to read the book and want to know what I mean, it’s there in the first line of at least one Goodreads review. I rarely give reading advice, but I don’t recommend looking at that review if you plan on reading this. Whatever you do, as per usual, read the introduction after the novel.
Like the way Laura (Lolly) feels about autumn, the payoff is worth the anticipation.
July 21, 2015
This made David Mitchell's All-Time Top-Ten List, sorta: http://www.toptenbooks.net/authors/da...
That maybe explains The Bone Clocks.
I'm of two minds about this, though. I loved the imagery, and whole passages that made me want to applaud. Lolly goes to nurse, late in the First World War. The recruiting posters have bleached.
The ruddy young man and his Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia's scarlet cloak trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them discolor with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from a young man's cheeks, and from Britannia's mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her.
And I like when Lolly had had enough of her lawyer brother, Henry:
"Have done with your trumpery red herring!" she cried.
It is then that the unmarried Lolly goes off on her own. As she tells Henry: Nothing is impractical for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own.
She soon wonders: Did God, after casting out the rebel angels and before settling down to the peace of a heaven unpeopled of contradiction, use Adam as an intermediate step?
This is the point in the book where Mitchell would bring out the zap guns. But Warner chooses allegory instead. Lolly finds a baby kitten; or the kitten finds her. Every kitten needs a name. "What shall you call it?"
Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you:
"I shall call it Vinegar," she answered.
Because every witch needs a familiar. It's like this:
"It's like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. ... You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other's silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all."
She is talking to Satan when she says that. He listens.
_______________ ________________ ______________
Two final things"
One, read Kelly's 'review' of this. Just read it.
Second, I like absolute truisms nestled in the books I read. Like this: One has to offer marriage to a young woman who has picked dead wasps out of one's armpit. I mean, who could argue with that?
That maybe explains The Bone Clocks.
I'm of two minds about this, though. I loved the imagery, and whole passages that made me want to applaud. Lolly goes to nurse, late in the First World War. The recruiting posters have bleached.
The ruddy young man and his Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia's scarlet cloak trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them discolor with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from a young man's cheeks, and from Britannia's mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her.
And I like when Lolly had had enough of her lawyer brother, Henry:
"Have done with your trumpery red herring!" she cried.
It is then that the unmarried Lolly goes off on her own. As she tells Henry: Nothing is impractical for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own.
She soon wonders: Did God, after casting out the rebel angels and before settling down to the peace of a heaven unpeopled of contradiction, use Adam as an intermediate step?
This is the point in the book where Mitchell would bring out the zap guns. But Warner chooses allegory instead. Lolly finds a baby kitten; or the kitten finds her. Every kitten needs a name. "What shall you call it?"
Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you:
"I shall call it Vinegar," she answered.
Because every witch needs a familiar. It's like this:
"It's like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. ... You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other's silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all."
She is talking to Satan when she says that. He listens.
_______________ ________________ ______________
Two final things"
One, read Kelly's 'review' of this. Just read it.
Second, I like absolute truisms nestled in the books I read. Like this: One has to offer marriage to a young woman who has picked dead wasps out of one's armpit. I mean, who could argue with that?
November 24, 2008
Wow! A great book. Impossible to say much without giving away the treasures to be discovered in these pages. As the jacket says, "an upper-class spinster rebels against her role as the universal aunt" and how does she do this? With the help of the Devil. But not the devil we are often told of--this is a loving huntsman, who catches women's souls to save them from dying by the confines of society. This is not a sort of compelling, page-turner read but every time I decided to sit down with it, I was completely absorbed and "bewitched." Beautifully and insightfully written. A shame it's so neglected now and I encourage anyone interested in forgotten "classics," feminist authors, or just a very well-written tale set in England, to seek out this delightful and thought-provoking read.
February 8, 2010
I wish I could write in such a way as to convey the rhythms and flavor of Lolly Willowes, which is only one of the things I fell in love with while reading this book. There was always a tendency to get so caught up in the prose that I forgot to follow along in the action and had to go back and reread passages (a “good” thing in this case).
I’ve tried to find a representative passage short enough to reproduce here so readers don’t imagine that I’m making things up but I can’t so I’ll just throw in two entirely random quotes from pp. 58-9 and hope you can see what I mean, however faintly:
The story is about Laura “Lolly” Willowes, the youngest daughter (b. 1874) of Everard Willowes, who spends the first half of her life living in the shadow of others before breaking free from her family to undergo an extraordinary transformation and “finding herself” when she moves to Great Mop and makes a pact with Satan (or does she?).
The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets up the situation against which Lolly rebels by narrating the events in her life that bring her to live with her eldest brother, Henry; his wife, Caroline; and their two daughters, Fancy and Marion, in London. The Willowes are an upper middle class family that has made their money in breweries and (like most of the non-noble gentry of that era) aspired to live like the nobility – landed estates, proper marriages, the stifling conformity of late Victorian England, and all that. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett (whose virtues I’ve praised elsewhere), Warner evinces little liking for this society but her chidings are less acerbic, more gentle, and her heroine (at least in this, her first novel that I’ve read) successfully leaves it behind, unlike Compton-Burnett’s, who usually wind up as trapped in the end as at the beginning:
In Part II, Lolly breaks with her family to move to the village of Great Mop, in the Chilterns. I’m not familiar enough with on-the-ground English geography to have a good grasp of where this is (I had to go to Wikipedia and look it up) but Warner manages to bring it alive with her descriptions of Lolly’s wanderings around the district as she explores her new home. As in Part I, Warner carefully lays the groundwork for Lolly’s encounter with the Prince of Darkness with hints that things aren’t quite what they seem in Great Mop. For example, why does everyone seem to stay up so late at night?
Part II ends when Lolly’s enjoyment of her new freedom is threatened by her nephew Titus’ announced plans to move to Great Mop because he’s entranced by its bucolic ways. Titus is the son of Lolly’s deceased second brother John. She likes him well enough, and would welcome visits, but his intention to follow her into the “wilderness” leaves her feeling as confined, stifled and miserable as she was in London with Henry and clan:
One day, walking in the woods around Great Mop, Lolly enters an unfamiliar area. Her mind is in turmoil and she imagines she senses a presence in the wood, to which she offers herself body and soul if only she can get rid of Titus. She immediately realizes that she’s made a pact with the Devil and hurries home. There she finds a kitten has snuck into her cottage, and when he bites her, understands that it’s her familiar sent by Satan to aid her.
Or is that what happened? One of Warner’s better tricks is that you can’t really be sure if she’s introduced a supernatural element or not. Everything that happens subsequently can be explained without resorting to infernal pacts. Everything can be explained as a rationalization of Lolly’s rebellion.
In the final scene of the novel, Lolly encounters the Devil in person (or not – he could be just a man she encounters or even a figment of her imagination) and explains herself:
The first thing I read of Warner was her collection of fairy stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and that’s because I kept coming across references to her work in compendia of fantastic places. I enjoyed her stories and writing style, and always meant to get around to reading more of her stuff. It took a glowing review of a reprint of Summer Will Show in The Nation magazine to make me take the plunge and I’m glad I did. Highly recommended to anyone following these reviews.
I’ve tried to find a representative passage short enough to reproduce here so readers don’t imagine that I’m making things up but I can’t so I’ll just throw in two entirely random quotes from pp. 58-9 and hope you can see what I mean, however faintly:
“Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. `It is,’ answered Laura with almost violent agreement. `If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.’”
and,
“Laura’s hair was black as ever, but it was not so thick. She had grown paler from living in London. Her forehead had not a wrinkle, but two downward lines prolonged the drooping corners of her mouth. Her face was beginning to stiffen. It had lost its power of expressiveness and was more and more dominated by the hook nose and the sharp chin. When Laura was ten years older she would be nut-crackerish.”
The story is about Laura “Lolly” Willowes, the youngest daughter (b. 1874) of Everard Willowes, who spends the first half of her life living in the shadow of others before breaking free from her family to undergo an extraordinary transformation and “finding herself” when she moves to Great Mop and makes a pact with Satan (or does she?).
The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets up the situation against which Lolly rebels by narrating the events in her life that bring her to live with her eldest brother, Henry; his wife, Caroline; and their two daughters, Fancy and Marion, in London. The Willowes are an upper middle class family that has made their money in breweries and (like most of the non-noble gentry of that era) aspired to live like the nobility – landed estates, proper marriages, the stifling conformity of late Victorian England, and all that. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett (whose virtues I’ve praised elsewhere), Warner evinces little liking for this society but her chidings are less acerbic, more gentle, and her heroine (at least in this, her first novel that I’ve read) successfully leaves it behind, unlike Compton-Burnett’s, who usually wind up as trapped in the end as at the beginning:
“But on the following summer the sandbags had rotted and burst and the barbed-wire had been absorbed into the farmer’s fences. So, Laura thought, such warlike phenomena as Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Fancy’s second husband, and Jemima and Rosalind, Fancy’s two daughters, might well disappear off the family landscape. Mr. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. Jemima and Rosalind were more obtrusive. Here was a new generation to call her Aunt Lolly and find her as indispensable as did the last.” p. 74
and,
“They condoned this extravagance, yet they mistrusted it. Time justified them in their mistrust. Like many stupid people, they possessed acute instincts. `He that is unfaithful in little things…’ Caroline would say when the children forgot to wind up their watches. Their instinct told them that the same truth applies to extravagance in little things. They were wiser than they knew. When Laura’s extravagance in great things came it staggered them so completely that they forgot how judiciously they had suspected it beforehand.” p. 82
In Part II, Lolly breaks with her family to move to the village of Great Mop, in the Chilterns. I’m not familiar enough with on-the-ground English geography to have a good grasp of where this is (I had to go to Wikipedia and look it up) but Warner manages to bring it alive with her descriptions of Lolly’s wanderings around the district as she explores her new home. As in Part I, Warner carefully lays the groundwork for Lolly’s encounter with the Prince of Darkness with hints that things aren’t quite what they seem in Great Mop. For example, why does everyone seem to stay up so late at night?
Part II ends when Lolly’s enjoyment of her new freedom is threatened by her nephew Titus’ announced plans to move to Great Mop because he’s entranced by its bucolic ways. Titus is the son of Lolly’s deceased second brother John. She likes him well enough, and would welcome visits, but his intention to follow her into the “wilderness” leaves her feeling as confined, stifled and miserable as she was in London with Henry and clan:
“Laura hated him for daring to love it so. She hated him for daring to love it at all. Most of all she hated him for imposing his kind of love on her. Since he had come to Great Mop she had not been allowed to love in her own way. Commenting, pointing out, appreciating, Titus tweaked her senses one after another as if they were so many bell-ropes…. Day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself further from her…. Presently she would not know it any more. For her too Great Mop would be a place like any other place, a pastoral landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew.” pp. 163-4
One day, walking in the woods around Great Mop, Lolly enters an unfamiliar area. Her mind is in turmoil and she imagines she senses a presence in the wood, to which she offers herself body and soul if only she can get rid of Titus. She immediately realizes that she’s made a pact with the Devil and hurries home. There she finds a kitten has snuck into her cottage, and when he bites her, understands that it’s her familiar sent by Satan to aid her.
Or is that what happened? One of Warner’s better tricks is that you can’t really be sure if she’s introduced a supernatural element or not. Everything that happens subsequently can be explained without resorting to infernal pacts. Everything can be explained as a rationalization of Lolly’s rebellion.
In the final scene of the novel, Lolly encounters the Devil in person (or not – he could be just a man she encounters or even a figment of her imagination) and explains herself:
“It’s like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans…. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all…. Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair…. Anyhow, even if it isn’t true of dynamite, it’s true of women…. Some may get religion, then they’re all right, I expect. But for the others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real. Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with them, they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are…. Her soul – when no one else would give a look at her body even!... But you say: `Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.’ That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business to satisfy our passion for adventure…. One doesn’t become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day…. pp. 239-43
The first thing I read of Warner was her collection of fairy stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and that’s because I kept coming across references to her work in compendia of fantastic places. I enjoyed her stories and writing style, and always meant to get around to reading more of her stuff. It took a glowing review of a reprint of Summer Will Show in The Nation magazine to make me take the plunge and I’m glad I did. Highly recommended to anyone following these reviews.
March 9, 2013
The title was playful, but I didn't understand the purpose of the book. Nothing interesting happened. Rather, nothing happened. A spinster moves to a place because she liked a flower that was grown there, her nephew moves there and she all of a sudden hates him for no reason, she sees a man who is the devil, she wakes up a witch and nothing happens because of it. What? On a positive note, it was short.
September 29, 2017
Laura finds her life suffocated by controlling and overbearing relatives. She takes drastic measures to gain independence. I found the ending strange, this book must have been quite shocking at the time it was published !
August 26, 2021
What an extraordinary book. Close to a 5-star read for me.
April 20, 2021
Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!
История о том, как одна женщина в принципе всего-то и хотела, что быть одной.
История о том, как одна женщина в принципе всего-то и хотела, что быть одной.
October 13, 2022
3.5 stars
Honestly, I had no idea what I was about to read other than I knew that something very, very odd, strange and uncanny was going to happen. That’s it. So at the start of this slim little novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the prose and the way in which we are right from the start being told that this character was to be a victim of sorts of her class and time. When we meet Laura “Lolly” Willowes, her father has just passed away and Laura is automatically to be sent to live in the household of one of her brothers in London. You see, Laura is a 28 year old unmarried woman who loved her father and knew nothing but a life in his house that enabled her to do as she pleased. However, that carefree life in the country becomes a more restrictive one when she moves to London.
Lolly is one of these women who becomes a pawn at the expense of her brother’s family and lives in his house as the spinster Aunt, doing all of the things this role expected of her and nothing of what she desires. It was believed that an unmarried woman needed the assistance of her family and it was never, ever considered appropriate for her to be on her own. Even one like Laura who was left a small fortune that would enable her to live independently. One of the ideas and themes that Warner has set out to tackle in this story of Lolly Willowes is how a patriarchal society can diminish, in a quiet and loving way, a woman’s life. For instance, Laura’s identity morphs into “Aunt Lolly” when one of her brother’s children bestows upon her this new nickname. She comes to be known as Lolly by the entire family. She dislikes this name very, very much but never lets on keeping her thoughts and feelings inside all the while enduring the agony of this unbearable transformation. She is also expected to take on a long list of duties that essentially take away all of her original identity - the Laura from the country who loved the outdoors and taking long walks. Usually in the autumn, there would be a feeling of liberation that she didn’t quite understand at first but it is
a something that was dark and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels, and by the voices of the birds of ill omen.
Year after year, Lolly settles into this crippling and numbing life that has caused her to forget herself, when she finally awakens and moves out on her own to a new town defying her family and society, back to the country, in order to find her own freedom that she has been held back from for so, so long. Believe me when I say that she finds something that most of us would think twice about before accepting.
This was about the first 2/3 of the novel and finally, it shifts into something quite different and abnormal. Things are definitely on the unusual side and Laura makes a choice here that gives her her freedom but with a great and shocking cost. What she decides is so unpredictable. But Townsend’s feminist treatise resounds at this final act. She is presenting to anyone who reads this novel that life is imprisoning for women in a male dominated world. It is punishing and seeks to put women in a box with no self-identifying value. This one wins the award for most unusual read this year!
Honestly, I had no idea what I was about to read other than I knew that something very, very odd, strange and uncanny was going to happen. That’s it. So at the start of this slim little novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the prose and the way in which we are right from the start being told that this character was to be a victim of sorts of her class and time. When we meet Laura “Lolly” Willowes, her father has just passed away and Laura is automatically to be sent to live in the household of one of her brothers in London. You see, Laura is a 28 year old unmarried woman who loved her father and knew nothing but a life in his house that enabled her to do as she pleased. However, that carefree life in the country becomes a more restrictive one when she moves to London.
Lolly is one of these women who becomes a pawn at the expense of her brother’s family and lives in his house as the spinster Aunt, doing all of the things this role expected of her and nothing of what she desires. It was believed that an unmarried woman needed the assistance of her family and it was never, ever considered appropriate for her to be on her own. Even one like Laura who was left a small fortune that would enable her to live independently. One of the ideas and themes that Warner has set out to tackle in this story of Lolly Willowes is how a patriarchal society can diminish, in a quiet and loving way, a woman’s life. For instance, Laura’s identity morphs into “Aunt Lolly” when one of her brother’s children bestows upon her this new nickname. She comes to be known as Lolly by the entire family. She dislikes this name very, very much but never lets on keeping her thoughts and feelings inside all the while enduring the agony of this unbearable transformation. She is also expected to take on a long list of duties that essentially take away all of her original identity - the Laura from the country who loved the outdoors and taking long walks. Usually in the autumn, there would be a feeling of liberation that she didn’t quite understand at first but it is
a something that was dark and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels, and by the voices of the birds of ill omen.
Year after year, Lolly settles into this crippling and numbing life that has caused her to forget herself, when she finally awakens and moves out on her own to a new town defying her family and society, back to the country, in order to find her own freedom that she has been held back from for so, so long. Believe me when I say that she finds something that most of us would think twice about before accepting.
This was about the first 2/3 of the novel and finally, it shifts into something quite different and abnormal. Things are definitely on the unusual side and Laura makes a choice here that gives her her freedom but with a great and shocking cost. What she decides is so unpredictable. But Townsend’s feminist treatise resounds at this final act. She is presenting to anyone who reads this novel that life is imprisoning for women in a male dominated world. It is punishing and seeks to put women in a box with no self-identifying value. This one wins the award for most unusual read this year!
January 18, 2021
4.5 stars
As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.
This striking story, published in 1926, perfectly blends a deceptive lightness with a serious argument: that a woman sidelined by life has so little opportunity for escape and respect that she might as well become a witch.
The blurbs on most versions of the novel give away too much of the slim “story” as it is, so I will only say that this is a book with tea parties, and a book in which a spinster converses at length with the devil, and it is well worth reading.
As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.
This striking story, published in 1926, perfectly blends a deceptive lightness with a serious argument: that a woman sidelined by life has so little opportunity for escape and respect that she might as well become a witch.
The blurbs on most versions of the novel give away too much of the slim “story” as it is, so I will only say that this is a book with tea parties, and a book in which a spinster converses at length with the devil, and it is well worth reading.
October 16, 2022
“'But Lolly, what you want is absurd.’
‘It’s only my own way, Henry.’”
I loved this story! When her father dies, Laura is made to move out of her family home in the country and in with her brother and his family in London. She involuntarily transforms form Laura to Aunt Lolly, and is forced to devote her life to their needs.
“She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to relinquish her name also.”
Time just gets away from her, and soon she’s middle aged and desperate for her own life. She up and leaves them all to go to the Chilterns, where she discovers how much she enjoys being alone and being in nature. Her solitary walks put her in touch with some supernatural forces, and eventually these lead her to … well let’s just say an unconventional life choice.
I loved Laura--the way she stands up for herself and embraces her individuality. I especially loved how she knows things she doesn’t know.
What I didn’t like was the writing. I can’t really say why--I have a very personal reaction to writing styles, and this one didn’t work for me. I tried to think of it as wild, but word choices kept tripping me up and it just felt odd and frustrating.
So I’m sorry, Sylvia. You came up with a fantastic story, and I admire you for it. It just would have worked better for me if told by someone else. It’s very special though, and I can see why it has delighted many readers.
‘It’s only my own way, Henry.’”
I loved this story! When her father dies, Laura is made to move out of her family home in the country and in with her brother and his family in London. She involuntarily transforms form Laura to Aunt Lolly, and is forced to devote her life to their needs.
“She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to relinquish her name also.”
Time just gets away from her, and soon she’s middle aged and desperate for her own life. She up and leaves them all to go to the Chilterns, where she discovers how much she enjoys being alone and being in nature. Her solitary walks put her in touch with some supernatural forces, and eventually these lead her to … well let’s just say an unconventional life choice.
I loved Laura--the way she stands up for herself and embraces her individuality. I especially loved how she knows things she doesn’t know.
What I didn’t like was the writing. I can’t really say why--I have a very personal reaction to writing styles, and this one didn’t work for me. I tried to think of it as wild, but word choices kept tripping me up and it just felt odd and frustrating.
So I’m sorry, Sylvia. You came up with a fantastic story, and I admire you for it. It just would have worked better for me if told by someone else. It’s very special though, and I can see why it has delighted many readers.
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February 15, 2017In April of 1926, a fledgling Book of the Month Club announced its first ever selection, Lolly Willowes. Written by debut author Sylvia Townsend Warner, the novel tells the story of an unmarried woman who refuses to live the life that her family and society expects her to live. A bold and beguiling story about personal freedom, uneasy friendships, and witchcraft, Lolly Willowes was selected despite the fact that its author was completely unknown at the time.
Warner went on to have a long and respected career. She published novels, short stories, and poetry collections until her death in 1978. When later asked about how it felt to have written Book of the Month’s very first selection, she said, “I was astonished, delighted and confident that any organization daring enough to pick an unknown author would be a valuable asset to contemporary literature.”
Over 90 years later, Lolly Willowes is considered a classic.
For more: https://www.bookofthemonth.com/lolly-...
Warner went on to have a long and respected career. She published novels, short stories, and poetry collections until her death in 1978. When later asked about how it felt to have written Book of the Month’s very first selection, she said, “I was astonished, delighted and confident that any organization daring enough to pick an unknown author would be a valuable asset to contemporary literature.”
Over 90 years later, Lolly Willowes is considered a classic.
For more: https://www.bookofthemonth.com/lolly-...
October 29, 2021
Dopo anni trascorsi all’ombra di tradizioni e convenzioni sociali, Laura, detta zia Lolly, ascolta e segue l’impulso che avverte inizialmente solo in autunno come una strana bramosia, un’insolita malinconia, dando una svolta decisiva alla propria vita. Da Londra si trasferisce a Great Mop, paesino sperduto e poco conosciuto, dove a poco a poco riesce a identificare e a definire quell’ansia che la assale sempre più spesso. È pronta per il passo successivo.
Scritto con eleganza e attraversato da una irresistibile vena di humor inglese, si perde un po’ nella parte centrale, per poi riprendersi nel crescendo delle geniali pagine successive.
Scritto con eleganza e attraversato da una irresistibile vena di humor inglese, si perde un po’ nella parte centrale, per poi riprendersi nel crescendo delle geniali pagine successive.
August 5, 2022
Lolly Willowes is a mildly confronting book to read now: I can't help feeling it must have baffled many readers when it first appeared nearly 100 years ago.
The first part of the book is a cleverly drawn satire of the constricting middle-class family life that holds Laura Willowes in thrall as useful sister, sister-in-law and aunt Lolly. The diminutive form of her name, allocated by one of her nieces (or nephew, I can't remember) indicates the diminished quality of her life within her brother's house after her father's death means she has to leave her country home and move to London.
In London, it takes the best part of 20 years before she begins to feel the deep call of woods and trees and tells her brother she is going to live in a village called Great Mop in the Chilterns. She's never been there, but liked the sound of it in a guide book.
So, into part two.
This starts out in fairly conventional style but veers then plunges into not-quite supernatural and not-quite rustic comedic fantasy as Lolly absorbs the spirits of the earth, the woods and the weather.
At this point I'm heading into spoiler territory:
That's enough, I think, to indicate that Lolly's/Laura's mental processes are unusual. Townsend Warner's visions were too.
It's not a spoiler to reveal that Lolly is a witch, able to use her new talents, with help from her new master, to send off her needy nephew Titus in hilarious style.
It's a book I wouldn't have found without Goodreads friends' reviews appearing in my feed.
Here's a link to NYRB promo of another edition.
https://www.nyrb.com/products/lolly-w...
The first part of the book is a cleverly drawn satire of the constricting middle-class family life that holds Laura Willowes in thrall as useful sister, sister-in-law and aunt Lolly. The diminutive form of her name, allocated by one of her nieces (or nephew, I can't remember) indicates the diminished quality of her life within her brother's house after her father's death means she has to leave her country home and move to London.
In London, it takes the best part of 20 years before she begins to feel the deep call of woods and trees and tells her brother she is going to live in a village called Great Mop in the Chilterns. She's never been there, but liked the sound of it in a guide book.
So, into part two.
This starts out in fairly conventional style but veers then plunges into not-quite supernatural and not-quite rustic comedic fantasy as Lolly absorbs the spirits of the earth, the woods and the weather.
At this point I'm heading into spoiler territory:
That's enough, I think, to indicate that Lolly's/Laura's mental processes are unusual. Townsend Warner's visions were too.
It's not a spoiler to reveal that Lolly is a witch, able to use her new talents, with help from her new master, to send off her needy nephew Titus in hilarious style.
It's a book I wouldn't have found without Goodreads friends' reviews appearing in my feed.
Here's a link to NYRB promo of another edition.
https://www.nyrb.com/products/lolly-w...
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