Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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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. 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.

By the time the Great War had ended, the world was a bit tipsy. Perhaps the strongest survivors were the women who had worked in the factories and found themselves with extra money, more freedom, and a yearning for more rights. The 1920s brought somewhat liberated young women to the forefront, as they were the remaining half of the wiped-out generation. This book is really a reflection of that new fast-moving world, as young Lolly Willowes decides to start doing her life the way she wants it done and not pre-war style. JamesDavid. ‘Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century’. In Regional Modernisms, edited by AlexanderNeal and MoranJames (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). HeideggerMartin. Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by HofstadterAlbert (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1971). Lolly doesn’t forgive the unforgivable; she simply walks away. Henry and Caroline, she realised in London, “were half hidden under their accumulations – accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience”. As Townsend Warner puts it in what is one of my favourite passages, for its sure-footed mix of mundanity and exaggeration:KnollBruce. ‘“An Existence Doled Out”: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 344–363. ButtsMary. ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1925). In ‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998). 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: NesbittJennifer Poulos. ‘Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth-Century Literature 49 (2003), pp. 449–471.

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. The book] I’ll be pressing into people’s hands forever is “Lolly Willowes,” the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness.”– Helen Macdonald in The New York Times Book Review‘s “By the Book.” 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. Waters, Sarah (2012). "Sylvia Townsend Warner: the neglected writer". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 July 2016.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. The women in Laura’s life who perform gender better than she does, who read the right books, got the right look, the right husband, the right house in London and the right holiday spots in the country or by the seaside, don’t have lives that look more open or fulfilling than her own. They are mothers, menders, and spoilers of husbands less capable than themselves. Of the sister-in-law with whom she lives for much of the book, Laura thinks, “She was slightly self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she 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.” This constant indulgence by his wife changes Henry’s “natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view.” A good wife makes a worse husband.

Silvia Townsend Warner...is perhaps the most unjustly neglected of all the modern masters of fiction. She is remembered as a writer of historical novels, but her novels are written with such extraordinary immediacy that they stretch the possibilities of long-disparaged genera and blur the distinction between historical fiction and serious literature....Like the controversial movie Thelma and Louise, Lolly Willowes is [a] Rorschach blot that might suggest liberation to some readers and folly to others. It is an edgy tale that suggests how taking control of one's own life might entail losing control; it might even entail an inexorable drift toward an unknown and possibly disastrous fate. In short, Lolly Willowes would be an ideal book-club selection, sure to spark a rousing discussion. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience of normal boilers and normal policemen. GarrityJane. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 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?

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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 Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. a b c d e Maroula Joannou, "Warner, Sylvia Townsend", in Faye Hammill, Esme Miskimmin, Ashlie Sponenberg (eds.) An Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950. Palgrave, 2008 ISBN 0-230-22177-7 (pp. 266-7) putting her hand to her face to wipe off the sweat, she discovered that she smelled of this ambiguous territory […] She plunged her hands into a bush and snuffed into the palms. It was so exciting to discover herself thus perfumed […] that she suddenly found her teeth biting into her flesh, and that was a pleasure too […]