Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you: The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behavior imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.” The novel flows beautifully, and has many lines like this: "The bees droned in the motionless lime trees" (38). Sensitive images like that do many things: they show the passion for the countryside (as I mentioned), and also give the reader a sense of time, and place, and mood, and Lolly's interior thoughts. These carefully-crafted sentences are not random poetic lines dropped into the text but part and parcel of this novel's pace and tone of voice. In a pivotal scene, Lolly is in a shop room when she goes into a sort of meditative trance; the room falls quiet like she's alone outdoors: "No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a riper plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows" (80).

For Townsend Warner, this "concussion" came a few years after the triumphant publication of Lolly Willowes. She fell in love with the poet Valentine Acland, and spent the rest of her life in Dorset. From the 1930s to 70s, she contributed short stories to the New Yorker. She died in 1978. A Note on the Text 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. Here, Satan appears in the guise of a woodsman/hunter, and they have a little chat. they have another chat later on, when Satan appears as a gardener, but she knows who he is. No trace of a forked tail, hooves or horns. Just a comfortable country man to whom she's happy to give her soul. Her master. 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: 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).JamesDavid. ‘Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century’. In Regional Modernisms, edited by AlexanderNeal and MoranJames (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

I thought the book was going to focus more on her trials as a spinster in the 1920s England. It did to some extent but it took such an odd, unexpected turn towards the end when Lolly moves away to a little hamlet and then realizes that she’s a witch. I didn’t really feel as though the story had developed sufficiently in that direction to make me believe that incident was credible. PattersonAnnabel. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 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? To amuse herself she had cut the dough into likenesses of the village people. Curious developments took place in the baking. And plus, it didn’t seem to make sense that to complete her rejection of the cloying overbearing insufferable men of her family Miss Willowes would find it necessary to place herself in the power of another big strong male figure.NesbittJennifer Poulos. ‘Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth-Century Literature 49 (2003), pp. 449–471. SquierSusan Merrill. Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). In 2014, Robert McCrum chose it as one of the 100 Best Novels in English, for his list for The Guardian. [3] See also [ edit ] 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) 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.”– Helen Macdonald in The New York Times Book Review‘s “By the Book.”