Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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That's enough, I think, to indicate that Lolly's/Laura's mental processes are unusual. Townsend Warner's visions were too. Lolly Willowes explores the ways that patriarchy can quietly, gently, lovingly deform a woman’s entire life. The middle-class spinster from a respectable family has made a pact with the devil. Laura feels at peace.

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] 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] SquierSusan Merrill. Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).

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I loved this story! When her father dies, Laura is made to move out of her family home in the country and in with her brother and his family in London. She involuntarily transforms form Laura to Aunt Lolly, and is forced to devote her life to their needs. Until the 1960s, the manuscript of Lolly Willowes was displayed in the New York Public Library. [3] Warner’s writing marks her departure from normative encounters with landscape; her knowledge of space is arrived at not through map-reading or obeisance to marked footpaths, but through embodied experience. Becoming lost on the marsh, it is through her bodily awareness of her surroundings that Warner inhabits her environment. For Sukey, the marsh makes itself known to her through texture and smell, ‘sensations of pleasure’ which orientate her (TH, 26); Fortune, too, familiarises himself with the tropical strangeness of Fanua by ‘taking an interest in his sensations’. 34 In these ways Warner stages landscape encounter through the body, negotiating time and space not through normative or empirical means but through lived experience. Sara Ahmed writes, ‘Orientations are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places’. 35 Ahmed’s queer phenomenology is situated within an emergent discourse in queer studies that stresses the connections between queer identity, time and space. 36 As queer theory becomes increasingly attuned to the modernist canon, contemporary discourses of queer time and space can shed new light on Warner’s writing, in which a sustained spatiality presents a politics of citizenship in which marginalised sexualities and subjectivities are constructed and explored. She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to relinquish her name also.”

The women in Laura’s life who perform gender better than she does, who read the right books, got the right look, the right husband, the right house in London and the right holiday spots in the country or by the seaside, don’t have lives that look more open or fulfilling than her own. They are mothers, menders, and spoilers of husbands less capable than themselves. Of the sister-in-law with whom she lives for much of the book, Laura thinks, “She was slightly self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she 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.” This constant indulgence by his wife changes Henry’s “natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view.” A good wife makes a worse husband. Gender under patriarchy can’t help but harm women. It harms men, too, but it offers particular benefits that make that harm worthwhile for a whole lot of men. Gender under capitalist patriarchy is necessarily impossible. It isn’t a coincidence that gendered expectations are contradictory. The contradictions make it impossible to fulfill those expectations, and the impossibility places it always just out of reach, fixable with the right product, new look, new attitude, new behavior. For women under capitalist patriarchy, failing to fulfill gendered expectations is financially punished, but, crucially, so is fulfilling those expectations reasonably well. You might get the job or the marriage by being attractive and tidy and correctly female, but the rise to authority and true ownership of wealth is unlikely to follow. Fulfilling femininity to the satisfaction of men is nearly always an argument against your own potential. EnglishElizabeth. Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).I can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it was more of a shoulda coulda woulda. 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

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.It is then that the unmarried Lolly goes off on her own. As she tells Henry: Nothing is impractical for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own. Botany and brewery she now combined into one pursuit, for at the spur of Nannie’s rhyme she turned her attention into the forsaken green byways of the rural pharmacopeia. From Everard [her father] she got a little still, from the family recipe-books much information and good advice; and where these failed her, Nicholas Culpepper or old Goody Andrews, who might have been Nicholas’s crony by the respect she had for the moon, were ready to help her out. She roved the countryside for herbs and simples, and many were the washes and decoctions that she made from sweet-gale, water purslane, cowslips, and the roots of succory, while her salads gathered in fields and hedges were eaten by Everard, at first in hope and trust, and afterwards with flattering appetite. Encouraged by him, she even wrote a little book called “Health by the Wayside” commending the use of old-fashioned simples and healing herbs. It was published anonymously at the local press, and fell quite flat.” And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best. 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.” Townsend Warner’s depiction of Laura’s slow transformation is masterful. Her prose is beautiful and dangerous and wild. The reader pieces together hints and whispers of the secrets of the power held in the trees and fields of The Chilterns. I will leave it up to you to discover these secrets along with Laura. In the end, if you follow where Townsend Warner is leading you, you will explore themes related to power and autonomy, the deep connections possible between a place and a person who is open to undomesticated beauty, and the life possible for a woman who refuses to be constrained by convention and tradition, but who looks inside herself to determine how to live.