Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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AlexanderNeal, and JamesMoran (eds.). Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 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. 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: 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

The book I'll be pressing into people's hands forever is Lolly Willowes . . . Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness Helen Macdonald, The New York Times Book Review 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. In Lolly Willowes, patriarchy is assumed as a fact of life. The book takes place among the white middle classes of England: the comfortably landed professionals who benefit from the violence of patriarchal colonization and yet rarely encounter violence themselves. Laura Willowes, the daughter of an English brewer with a small inheritance of her own, is hardly one of the foremost victims of English might. None of the men in her life feel any antipathy toward her, and some even love her. Her material needs are met, and she should be satisfied. Sylvia Townsend Warner's whimsical take on postwar womanhood and the quest for meaning, subtitled "The Loving Huntsman", has a sharp edge, a satirical eye and a covert, untamed, eroticism. Townsend Warner was an unconventional lesbian. For her, inter-war women's potential was what mattered most. Women, says Lolly to the devil, "know they are dynamite" and simply long for "the concussion that may justify them". CastleTerry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).DaviesGill, MalcolmDavid and SimonsJohn (eds.). Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner: English Novelist, 1893–1978 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). 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. Even more impressive is the way that the prose is woven through with imagery creating a whole subtext of figurative meanings: 'When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding a universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks of a holly leaf', and 'He loved the countryside as if it were a body.' The first gestures towards male mythic gods creating worlds where the Latin fingere, 'to mould, to create, to form' is often the verb used just as it is when Pygmalion creates the most beautiful female statue who he prays to be converted into his ideal, adoring woman - a woman of his own creation. The latter playfully recalls the stereotype of the witchy crone. 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.

Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here. 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)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?" JonesClara. ‘Virginia Woolf and “The Villa Jones” (1931)’. Woolf Studies Annual 22 (2016), pp. 75–95. Lolly accepts her fate for years, but there is a desire in her to be free, and she rebels against the behavior she sees in her sister-in-law, Caroline, who 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. That desire for more independence eventually comes into its own, and from that moment this novel becomes an early anthem to feminism. a b c The 100 best novels: No 52 – Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926) The Guardian. 14 September 2014. Diana Wynne Jones's children's classic is one of the only fantasy novels to take domestic labor seriously