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. 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. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces. Moreover, it is clear that Mr Willowes loves his daughter very dearly, to the extent that he secretly hopes she will remain at home to take care of him even though he knows her future happiness may suffer as a result. 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.

It is about people who become their roles and responsibilities, to the extent that they forget that they were ever anything else. 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. A year after Mrs Dalloway (No 50 in this series), a startling literary voice with Bloomsbury connections appeared on the London scene with a highly original satire on postwar England. It had lost its power of expressiveness and was more and more dominated by the hook nose and the sharp chin. As a result of this experience, Laura decides that she is going to move to Great Mop, a tiny village in the midst of Buckinghamshire, where she intends to live modestly on her own.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. My expectations for this book were admittedly a little lofty, but to my delight, it did not disappoint. Laura Willowes (to allow her, her given name) is a dutiful unmarried daughter of twenty eight when her beloved father dies. 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?

As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.Born some years after her two elder brothers; Henry and James, Laura grew up almost as an only child, the apple of her father’s eye. 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. For instance, Laura’s identity morphs into “Aunt Lolly” when one of her brother’s children bestows upon her this new nickname. I rarely give reading advice, but I don’t recommend looking at that review if you plan on reading this. 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.

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. It’s very well-written and has this kin of wry sense of humor, while still managing to convey a sense of eeriness. Though sometimes disturbed by strange noises at night, she settles in and befriends her landlady and a poultry farmer. 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.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. Plus it wears its social commentary quite lightly, successfully avoiding the temptation to be too blunt or preachy. 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. 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. For her too Great Mop would be a place like any other place, a pastoral landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew.

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. 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. I grew up in a household defined by all three of these things, in a state that was defined by their opposites.

I didn’t really feel as though the story had developed sufficiently in that direction to make me believe that incident was credible.