Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

Product Information

The top edge is rubbed with some creasing and several tears of up to about 1/2" and there is a small tear on the bottom rear edge.

Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek. 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. In these ways Warner stages landscape encounter through the body, negotiating time and space not through normative or empirical means but through lived experience.Jacobs draws out the tensions between Warner’s mythic and realist modes, in which folklore, prehistory and magic negotiate with traditional pastoral to unsettle the historical present. As the first part of this essay suggests, Warner’s supple and shifting novels engage with and subvert the rural ideologies of the interwar period. For Townsend Warner, this "concussion" came a few years after the triumphant publication of Lolly Willowes.

Sukey walks through unmapped space, the path ‘lost in long grass’, following the sound of the creek until she is in view of the sea (TH, 25). Warner's short stories include the collections A Moral Ending and Other Stories, The Salutation, More Joy in Heaven, The Cat's Cradle Book, A Garland of Straw, The Museum of Cheats. M. Trevelyan described the sensory unity of his body while hiking as an ‘ecstasy of body and mind’; Vaughan Cornish, in Scenery and the Sense of Sight (1935), declared, ‘I regard the refined action of the senses as revelational’. A 1931 Council for the Preservation of Rural England pamphlet is explicit in its anxiety, describing the ‘great changes’ brought by new railway stations at Gerrards Cross and Beaconsfield, where ‘large residential settlements have sprung up with startling rapidity’.The description anticipates the development of her tactile relationship with the natural world; at Mr Saunter’s chicken farm at Great Mop, Laura enjoys holding hens in the crook of her arm, ‘while her fingers probed among the soft feathers and rigid quills of their breasts. The contrast of Mrs Leak’s cottage to Henry’s London household is significant; no longer assigned a single bedroom, Laura has the privacy of a locked parlour. The two women became committed members of the Communist Party, and in 1937, they travelled together to Spain during the Civil War to try to stop the spread of Fascism. Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her, just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not remembered to use either.

The dominant narrative upheld the antagonistic town/ country dichotomy, pitching a threatened rural England against fast-developing towns and an increasingly urban population. Yet Sukey continues to keep an eye on the pleasurable oddities of her environment: ‘It was dream-like indeed that she should be washing clothes and baking bread where once the fishes swam’ (TH, 21). 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. CPRE, ‘Penn Country’ Branch, Rules, Aims, Objects and Membership (1931); Mary Butts, ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1925) in ‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998), p. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside the secret, whatever it was.Laura’s resistance to sewing is explicit in the way the ‘silk rasped against her fingers’ so that ‘she shuddered inwardly’ (LW, 39). No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. Her relationship with Ackland inspired many of Warner's works, and the couple collaborated on a collection of poems, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, published in 1933. From her first work, it was clear that Warner's focus was on subverting societal norms; she would later heavily use the themes of rejecting the Church, a need for female empowerment, and independence in her works. Warner wrote a section on musical notation for the Oxford History of Music (it appeared in the introductory volume of 1929).