Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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LightAlison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991). So when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks (with a crushed red geranium) and had bent over the greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank showed only a dark, shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in the old holy painting that hung in the dining room and was called the Leonardo.

The novel, Townsend Warner’s first, was a hit, but she was dismayed to see many take its aura of genteel whimsy and oh-so-English fantasy at face value. Admirers, she complained to a friend, “told me that it was charming, that it was distinguished, and my mother said it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And my heart sank lower and lower; I felt as though I had tried to make a sword, only to be told what a pretty pattern there was on the blade.” The first sentence of Lolly Willowes reads, “When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her brother and his family.” The second sentence begins, “Of course.”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.

Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner (6 December 1893 – 1 May 1978) was an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin.

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In other words, Lolly may have won a battle; she didn't, however, win a war. There was still fighting to be done in 1926's post-Suffragette England - just as there was fighting to be done in the 1980's decade of Thatcher and Greenham Common ... And to Virago, a press set up especially to defend and promote the rights of women, Lolly Willowes and Townsend Warner must have seemed like stirring figures.

Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other. 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. 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. Until the 1960s, the manuscript of Lolly Willowes was displayed in the New York Public Library. [3] 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." JonesClara. ‘Virginia Woolf and “The Villa Jones” (1931)’. Woolf Studies Annual 22 (2016), pp. 75–95.

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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. 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. 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.