Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

the Great War had many consequences. 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. Sylvia Townsend Warner was a young poet who told her editor at Chatto & Windus that she had written a "story about a witch". Within a year, Lolly Willowes had become the talk of the town. Today, Townsend Warner holds her place in this series as a proto-feminist who is also a major minor classic.
Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a twentysomething middle-class Englishwoman who, on the death of her father, at first becomes a conventional maiden aunt living with her brother in London. Then, "groping after something", she makes a bid for personal freedom, an escape to Great Mop, "a secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns", where she finds herself happily becoming a witch in communion with the devil.
In the 1920s, the search for a life (or room) of one's own was a topical theme. The war had liberated millions of women (Townsend Warner had worked in a munitions factory) and wiped out a generation of young men. The role and responsibilities of widows and spinsters was a subject taken up by many writers, from Vera Brittain to DH Lawrence. Lolly addresses it when, having embraced her witchy self, she has a long conversation with a middle-aged country gent who turns out to be Satan. "The one thing all women hate," she tells him, "is to be thought dull."
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".
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

On publication Lolly Willowes did well with the London critical establishment, but made a special hit in France (shortlisted for the Prix Femina) and the US, where it was selected as an inaugural Book-of-the-Month title for the newly launched book club. Sylvia Townsend Warner's relationship with her American readers was cemented in 1929 when she was appointed guest editor of the New York Herald Tribune and subsequently became a long-term contributor of short stories to the New Yorker. The MS of Lolly Willowes was kept on display in the New York Public Library until the 1960s next to manuscripts by Woolf and Thackeray. The novel remains Townsend Warner's chief claim to fame, though her life as a lesbian and a communist gives her biography a frisson of passion and politics. For more about the literary career of this remarkable woman, the essential texts are Claire Harman's biography, Sylvia Townsend Warner (London, 1989) and I'll Stand By You: Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Acland, edited by Susanna Pinney (London, 1998).

Three More From Sylvia Townsend Warner

Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927); Summer Will Show (1936); The Corner that Held Them (1948).

News is under threat …

… just when we need it the most. Millions of readers around the world are flocking to the Guardian in search of honest, authoritative, fact-based reporting that can help them understand the biggest challenge we have faced in our lifetime. But at this crucial moment, news organisations are facing an unprecedented existential challenge. As businesses everywhere feel the pinch, the advertising revenue that has long helped sustain our journalism continues to plummet. We need your help to fill the gap.
You’ve read in the last six months. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to vital public service journalism. So, unlike many others, we made a different choice: to keep Guardian journalism open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This would not be possible without financial contributions from those who can afford to pay, who now support our work from 180 countries around the world.
We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.
Reader financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
We need your support so we can keep delivering quality journalism that’s open and independent. And that is here for the long term. Every reader contribution, however big or small, is so valuable

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

New Grub Street  is the first novel in this series explicitly to address, in a realistic narrative, the contemporary working conditions of a new class, the professional author.  George Gissing , born the son of a chemist in 1857, was breaking important new ground, as well as responding to significant cultural change in the literary generation after Dickens ( David Copperfield ) and Thackeray ( Pendennis ). By contrast, the eponymous hero of  David Copperfield  ( No 15 in this series ) is a writer, of course, but Dickens's focus is chiefly on Copperfield's childhood, not his career as a novelist. He never delves as painfully as Gissing does into the threadbare texture of Victorian literary life. Part of this is due to the social and cultural upheavals inspired by Forster's Education Act of 1870. Gissing's career as a man of letters was the product of this. For the rest of the century, the lives of writers and readers would undergo a profound transformation which wo
Read more

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)

Image
the first, and probably the most popular, of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories, a short, dark and compelling novel set in what he called “my apocryphal county”, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi. It was his ambition, he said, after the comparative failure of  The Sound and the Fury , “deliberately to write a tour de force”. Apart from Mark Twain ( No 23 in this series ), no other American writer before Faulkner had ever immersed his readers so completely in the vernacular language and culture of a society that was, and perhaps still is, so deeply foreign to mainstream American experience. The death and burial of a southern matriarch , Addie Bundren, is told from some 15 viewpoints, including that of the dying woman herself. The Bundren family’s demanding stream-of-consciousness narrative (Faulkner was a modernist pioneer) is intercut with the voices of the local doctor and preacher, together with neighbours and friends. From the first line, th
Read more