Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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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: 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. Fantasy Fanatic. “The Phoenix” is not Sylvia Townsend Warner’s only story that uses elements of fantasy. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), follows a woman who turns to witchcraft and practices magic. Her last collection of short stories, Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), follows the goings-on of a series of fairy courts throughout Europe. ButtsMary. ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1925). In ‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998). 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.

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.” MuñozJosé Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).DaviesGill, MalcolmDavid and SimonsJohn (eds.). Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner: English Novelist, 1893–1978 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). 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. CastleTerry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided This new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had thought of it as a denial of winter, a green spur that thrust through a tyrant's rusty armor. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.”

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 will go to my grave now,” and had left the room.” Find sources: "Lolly Willowes"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) 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. BurchardtJeremy. Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).

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.” 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. JoannouMaroula (ed.). The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 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. When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding an universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks peaks on a holly leaf.” 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

EnglishElizabeth. Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

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Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.” 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. 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: