Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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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.

Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). ‘“Penn Country” Branch, Rules, Aims, Objects and Membership, With an Introduction by Ralph M. Robinson’, Pamphlet No. 1, February 1931. 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. 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. 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! 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.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? a b Jane Dowson. Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge, 1996; ISBN 0-415-13095-6 (pp. 149–58).

Sylvia 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. SwaabPeter. ‘The Queerness of Lolly Willowes’, The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 2010, pp. 29–52.Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a devoted member of the Communist Party. Her many books include Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and Lolly Willows (both published by NYRB Classics), The Corner that Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. NesbittJennifer Poulos. ‘Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth-Century Literature 49 (2003), pp. 449–471. 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. 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 h Sylvia 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. 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 Willowesis [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 Willoweswould be an ideal book-club selection, sure to spark a rousing discussion.

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?" The middle-class spinster from a respectable family has made a pact with the devil. Laura feels at peace. She knows that, had she been “called upon to decide in cold blood between being an aunt and being a witch, she might have been overawed by habit and the cowardice of compunction.” But in a state of desperation, afraid of being forced into Aunt Lollyhood once more, Laura chooses unerringly: becoming a witch is the instinctive right choice. Moreover, she has always been a witch in training, she just wasn’t allowed to see it.DoanLaura, and GarrityJane (eds.). Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Woman and the National Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 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?).