Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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First published in 1926, this was the debut novel for Sylvia Townsend Warner, and is the first book I have read by her. After a while, Titus decides to move from his lodgings in Bloomsbury to Great Mop and be a writer, rather than managing the family business. Titus's renewed social and domestic reliance on Laura make her feel frustrated that even living in the Chilterns she cannot escape the duties expected of women. When out walking, she makes a pact with a force that she takes to be Satan, to be free from such duties. On returning to her lodgings, she discovers a kitten, whom she takes to be Satan's emissary, and names him Vinegar, in reference to an old picture of witches' familiars. Subsequently, her landlady takes her to a Witches' Sabbath attended by many of the villagers. 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:

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: 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. 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. JonesClara. ‘Virginia Woolf and “The Villa Jones” (1931)’. Woolf Studies Annual 22 (2016), pp. 75–95.

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Her first published book was the 1925 poetry collection The Espalier, which was praised by A E Housman and Arthur Quiller-Couch. [11] She was encouraged to write fiction by David Garnett. [12] Warner's novels included Lolly Willowes (1926), Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), Summer Will Show (1936), and The Corner That Held Them (1948). [13] Recurring themes are evident in a number of her works. These include a rejection of Christianity (in Mr Fortune's Maggot, and in Lolly Willowes, where the protagonist becomes a witch); the position of women in patriarchal societies ( Lolly Willowes, Summer Will Show, The Corner that Held Them); ambiguous sexuality, or bisexuality ( Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune's Maggot, Summer Will Show); and lyrical descriptions of landscape. [ citation needed] Mr Fortune's Maggot, about a missionary in the Pacific Islands, has been described as a "satirical, anti-imperialist novel". [14] In Summer Will Show, the heroine, Sophia Willoughby, travels to Paris during the 1848 Revolution and falls in love with a woman. [15] The Corner That Held Them (1948) focuses on the lives of a community of nuns in a medieval convent. [15] Titus, a kind man, a good nephew, the best and closest of Laura’s family, is still unable to enter her world without loving her into pain and nightmarish alienation from herself and from nature. Walking with Titus in the hills and woods, Laura feels “the spirit of the place withdraw itself further from her.” She feels it as an animate rejection by the land. If she walks it as an aunt with a nephew, soon she will only be able to walk it as an aunt with her nephew. Love it as he might, with all the deep Willowes love for country sights and smells, love he never so intimately and soberly, his love must be a horror to her. It was different in kind from hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well, and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it were a body. 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.

Steinman, Michael, The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell (Counterpoint 2001)PhillipsRichard, ShuttletonDavid and WattDiane (eds.). De-Centering Sexualities (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999). Merleau-PontyMaurice. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by SmithColin (London: Routledge, 1962). 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. 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

CastleTerry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). In a 1999 introduction to the novel's republication by New York Review Books, Alison Lurie wrote that "a woman who refuses the 'Aunt Lolly' role is, in the view of conventional society, a kind of witch, even if she does no evil," tying the novel to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, noting that Warner "had spoken for [such women] first." [4] Warner was involved in travelling to study source material and in transcribing the music into modern musical notation for publication. Warner wrote a section on musical notation for the Oxford History of Music (it appeared in the introductory volume of 1929). [10]

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The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. UCL Press; ISSN 2398-0605. Open access journal available free online. a b Darrell Schweitzer, "Warner, Sylvia Townsend", [sic] in St. James Guide To Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. St. James Press, 1996; ISBN 1-55862-205-5 (pp. 589–90). DoanLaura, and GarrityJane (eds.). Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Woman and the National Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 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 Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling than family: witchcraft.