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Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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The book I'll be pressing into people's hands forever is Lolly Willowes . . . Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness Helen Macdonald, The New York Times Book Review Lolly Willowes explores the ways that patriarchy can quietly, gently, lovingly deform a woman’s entire life. MuñozJosé Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

In prose, as much as poetry, 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. Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a devoted member of the Communist Party. Her many books include Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and Lolly Willows (both published by NYRB Classics), The Corner that Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I will go to my grave now,” and had left the room.”Titus, a kind man, a good nephew, the best and closest of Laura’s family, is still unable to enter her world without loving her into pain and nightmarish alienation from herself and from nature. Walking with Titus in the hills and woods, Laura feels “the spirit of the place withdraw itself further from her.” She feels it as an animate rejection by the land. If she walks it as an aunt with a nephew, soon she will only be able to walk it as an aunt with her nephew. The manner in which Lolly becomes a free being is unique and unorthodox. I tried to imagine how it would have been received by her original audience in 1926, to no avail. She seems to be saying that the caging of women by men makes any alternative preferable and no price too costly. Throughout the rest of the novel, Townsend Warner evokes the wild majesty of the land surrounding Great Mop. As Laura goes on long solitary walks through the lanes, fields, and forests, she opens up more and more to the wilderness around her, and in doing so, taps into a piece of herself that had remained buried until then. Laura also becomes aware of a darker power surrounding her. Laura sold her soul in 1922. It seemed a strangely old-fashioned thing to do in the age of riotous nihilism and centers that would not hold and the looming shadows of Great Wars leaning in on either side. And yet it was also the most modern solution Laura’s author, a woman living a very modern life, could fashion. In Part II, Lolly breaks with her family to move to the village of Great Mop, in the Chilterns. I’m not familiar enough with on-the-ground English geography to have a good grasp of where this is (I had to go to Wikipedia and look it up) but Warner manages to bring it alive with her descriptions of Lolly’s wanderings around the district as she explores her new home. As in Part I, Warner carefully lays the groundwork for Lolly’s encounter with the Prince of Darkness with hints that things aren’t quite what they seem in Great Mop. For example, why does everyone seem to stay up so late at night?

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.” Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you: Why must a woman imagine herself an agent of the embodiment of all evil only so she can take long walks and refuse to fetch and carry for others and not feel bad about any of it? The greatest gift that the devil gives Laura is the gift of watching her nephew in distress and not caring. Why should the devil be the only one to understand why this would be a gift? Warner explains this, a bit, to the reader at the end, but I do not think she needed to. It was in the way Laura shuddered when Caroline’s deepest feeling was revealed to have to do with Christ’s folded grave garments, it was in the way she saw a small, helpless kitten as the sign of her witchhood, in how she felt she had to give up the pretty flowers she bought for herself to Caroline’s living room and how she didn’t scream when her brothers left her tied to the tree as a child, but carried on singing and dreaming until her father found her that evening.HalberstamJudith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). I read somewhere that there are clues all along that she’s a witch: she likes flowers so much, makes herbal infusions and likes wandering in fields. In that case, I must be a witch too then. I found those assumptions to be a bit stereotypical, but maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. I guess the following quote also alludes to the fact that Lolly was missing something in her life: “Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds and ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness- these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.” Similarly, in her 2012 review of the novel, Lucy Scholes takes note of the feminist focus of the novel, as well as the fact that it predates the better known A Room of One's Own: "With its clear feminist agenda, Lolly Willowes holds its own among Townsend Warner's historical fiction, but it's also an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era." [5]

The novel was well received by critics on its publication. In France it was shortlisted for the Prix Femina and in the USA it was the very first Book Of The Month for the Book Club. [3] Honestly, I had no idea what I was about to read other than I knew that something very, very odd, strange and uncanny was going to happen. That’s it. So at the start of this slim little novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the prose and the way in which we are right from the start being told that this character was to be a victim of sorts of her class and time. When we meet Laura “Lolly” Willowes, her father has just passed away and Laura is automatically to be sent to live in the household of one of her brothers in London. You see, Laura is a 28 year old unmarried woman who loved her father and knew nothing but a life in his house that enabled her to do as she pleased. However, that carefree life in the country becomes a more restrictive one when she moves to London. The ruddy young man and his Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia's scarlet cloak trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them discolor with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from a young man's cheeks, and from Britannia's mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her. The story is about Laura “Lolly” Willowes, the youngest daughter (b. 1874) of Everard Willowes, who spends the first half of her life living in the shadow of others before breaking free from her family to undergo an extraordinary transformation and “finding herself” when she moves to Great Mop and makes a pact with Satan (or does she?). 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.DoanLaura, and GarrityJane (eds.). Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Woman and the National Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Diana Wynne Jones's children's classic is one of the only fantasy novels to take domestic labor seriously

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