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Lolly Willowes Sylvia Townsend Warner 9781853815027 Books

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Lolly Willowes Sylvia Townsend Warner 9781853815027 Books

To become witches.
To be free of the endless round of caring for men, who spend their time in importance and neediness.
Some of us have this now. Others will never be free. Laura Willowes is given the choice, although she doesn't know it. An odd little gem of a book.


Tags : Lolly Willowes [Sylvia Townsend Warner] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Book by Sylvia Townsend Warner,Sylvia Townsend Warner,Lolly Willowes,VIRAGO (LITT),1853815020,Fiction,General,Modern fiction

Lolly Willowes Sylvia Townsend Warner 9781853815027 Books Reviews

I wish I could write in such a way as to convey the rhythms and flavor of Lolly Willowes, which is only one of the things I fell in love with while reading this book. There was always a tendency to get so caught up in the prose that I forgot to follow along in the action and had to go back and reread passages (a "good" thing in this case).

I've tried to find a representative passage short enough to reproduce here so readers don't imagine that I'm making things up but I can't so I'll just throw in two entirely random quotes and hope you can see what I mean, however faintly "Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. `It is,' answered Laura with almost violent agreement. `If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.'"

and,

"Laura's hair was black as ever, but it was not so thick. She had grown paler from living in London. Her forehead had not a wrinkle, but two downward lines prolonged the drooping corners of her mouth. Her face was beginning to stiffen. It had lost its power of expressiveness and was more and more dominated by the hook nose and the sharp chin. When Laura was ten years older she would be nut-crackerish."

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?).

The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets up the situation against which Lolly rebels by narrating the events in her life that bring her to live with her eldest brother, Henry; his wife, Caroline; and their two daughters, Fancy and Marion, in London. The Willowes are an upper middle class family that has made their money in breweries and (like most of the non-noble gentry of that era) aspired to live like the nobility - landed estates, proper marriages, the stifling conformity of late Victorian England, and all that. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett (whose virtues I've praised elsewhere), Warner evinces little liking for this society but her chidings are less acerbic, more gentle, and her heroine (at least in this, her first novel that I've read) successfully leaves it behind, unlike Compton-Burnett's, who usually wind up as trapped in the end as at the beginning "But on the following summer the sandbags had rotted and burst and the barbed-wire had been absorbed into the farmer's fences. So, Laura thought, such warlike phenomena as Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Fancy's second husband, and Jemima and Rosalind, Fancy's two daughters, might well disappear off the family landscape. Mr. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. Jemima and Rosalind were more obtrusive. Here was a new generation to call her Aunt Lolly and find her as indispensable as did the last."

and,

"They condoned this extravagance, yet they mistrusted it. Time justified them in their mistrust. Like many stupid people, they possessed acute instincts. `He that is unfaithful in little things...' Caroline would say when the children forgot to wind up their watches. Their instinct told them that the same truth applies to extravagance in little things. They were wiser than they knew. When Laura's extravagance in great things came it staggered them so completely that they forgot how judiciously they had suspected it beforehand."

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?

Part II ends when Lolly's enjoyment of her new freedom is threatened by her nephew Titus' announced plans to move to Great Mop because he's entranced by its bucolic ways. Titus is the son of Lolly's deceased second brother John. She likes him well enough, and would welcome visits, but his intention to follow her into the "wilderness" leaves her feeling as confined, stifled and miserable as she was in London with Henry and clan "Laura hated him for daring to love it so. She hated him for daring to love it at all. Most of all she hated him for imposing his kind of love on her. Since he had come to Great Mop she had not been allowed to love in her own way. Commenting, pointing out, appreciating, Titus tweaked her senses one after another as if they were so many bell-ropes.... Day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself further from her.... Presently she would not know it any more. For her too Great Mop would be a place like any other place, a pastoral landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew."

One day, walking in the woods around Great Mop, Lolly enters an unfamiliar area. Her mind is in turmoil and she imagines she senses a presence in the wood, to which she offers herself body and soul if only she can get rid of Titus. She immediately realizes that she's made a pact with the Devil and hurries home. There she finds a kitten has snuck into her cottage, and when he bites her, understands that it's her familiar sent by Satan to aid her.

Or is that what happened? One of Warner's better tricks is that you can't really be sure if she's introduced a supernatural element or not. Everything that happens subsequently can be explained without resorting to infernal pacts. Everything can be explained as a rationalization of Lolly's rebellion.

In the final scene of the novel, Lolly encounters the Devil in person (or not - he could be just a man she encounters or even a figment of her imagination) and explains herself "It's like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans.... Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other's silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all.... Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair.... Anyhow, even if it isn't true of dynamite, it's true of women.... Some may get religion, then they're all right, I expect. But for the others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real. Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with them, they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are.... Her soul - when no one else would give a look at her body even!... But you say `Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.' That's why we become witches to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business to satisfy our passion for adventure.... One doesn't become a witch to run around being helpful either.... It's to escape all that - to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day...."

The first thing I read of Warner was her collection of fairy stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and that's because I kept coming across references to her work in compendia of fantastic places. I enjoyed her stories and writing style, and always meant to get around to reading more of her stuff. It took a glowing review of a reprint of Summer Will Show in The Nation magazine to make me take the plunge and I'm glad I did. Highly recommended to anyone following these reviews.
This novel is many things; some people say it might be a feminist novel and the author a literary maverick, or this novel is unusual because the main character finally realizes her true vocation as a witch, but _Lolly Willowes_ is so much more beautiful and complex than all that. For one thing, no review that I'd read said anything about this story being about one woman's love of the English countryside. The beauty of the land is on every page. The main character, Laura Willowes, "Aunt Lolly," gets so much pleasure from walking the hills and meadows and woods and woodland paths that I feel sure that author Sylvia Townsend Warner put herself into Lolly. If being passionate about solitary walks in nature is a sign of witchcraft, then let's have more of it.

The novel flows beautifully, and has many lines like this "The bees droned in the motionless lime trees" (38). Sensitive images like that do many things they show the passion for the countryside (as I mentioned), and also give the reader a sense of time, and place, and mood, and Lolly's interior thoughts. These carefully-crafted sentences are not random poetic lines dropped into the text but part and parcel of this novel's pace and tone of voice. In a pivotal scene, Lolly is in a shop room when she goes into a sort of meditative trance; the room falls quiet like she's alone outdoors "No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a riper plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows" (80).

The novel is 220 pages and divided into three parts of almost equal length, each part mapping out Lolly Willowes's life through her psychological development. Part 1 shows what the wild hill country meant to Lolly, as she goes from birth through childhood in the care of her loving father, whose nurturing of her is truly a touching portrait of fatherhood. This opening section also shows the social environment in which Lolly is embedded; we see the development of her two brothers and their wives and children, how they are well-off--but perhaps not typically middle-class--and how the "spinster aunt" Lolly plays a useful social role. The Willowes stalwart Englishness is characterized by steadfast values, often predictable, but what society depends upon. Though Lolly seems stuck in one position (the maiden Aunt), it is a comfortable prison. This early portrait of Laura Willowes is necessary to show her later development and how her streak of creativity finds expression when she breaks away from her brother and the Willowes's stable and secure existence.

Also of note is that this novel was originally published in 1926 and now has a kind of sociological or non-fiction quality. I'm not spoiling the novel for you if I suggest that the turning point is in Part 1 around the topic of how the Willowes family holds up during World War I, or the Great War, during which they have been confined to London During the immediate aftermath of the war, Lolly becomes aware that she is hungry for change in life "She [Lolly] saw how admirable it was for Henry and Caroline [ her brother and his wife ] to have stayed where they were [in London]." The narrator continues, "But she was conscious, more conscious than they were, that the younger members of the family had somehow moved into new positions. And she herself, had she not slightly strained against her moorings, fast and far sunk as they were?" (66). Again, the key to Lolly/Laura's happiness is the countryside--but in an unusual expression of creative energy and self-consciousness, which you'll find out when you read.

There is an understated sensuality at work all through this novel, one that male readers can appreciate, too, since Warner knew that there were men like Lolly Willowes, who wanted to break away from their masculine social roles in the 1920s.
"Lolly Willowes" is a very well written book that takes place in the early 20th century when women did not have a voice. Laura, aka "Lolly" finds her voice in a most unusual way. This book has an interesting perspective of feminism and religion. I do recommend this book.
I love this book! The main character is wonderful~ very relatable, and I loved reading about her desire for independence and solitude. Gorgeous writing, beautiful story! I want to read this again soon.
I was entranced by this book at first, very interested in the title character's circumstances and her choice of solutions. Just when she seemed on the brink of enlightenment, in walks a kitten and the light goes on in Lolly's head. It all makes sense. . .at least to her, but not to me. Without revealing too much, Lolly seems as controlled by unconventional outside forces at the end as she is at the beginning by more conventional forces. I was disappointed for her.
I truly enjoyed this book mainly because I enjoy the occasional read where you are slowly involved in the protagonist's life. I was traveling along with Lolly when all of a sudden she took an unexpected and, honestly, unlikely turn. I like endings that are endings. I am not sure if Lolly is or has she finally gotten the insight to not be. It was worth reading and worth at least four stars
To become witches.
To be free of the endless round of caring for men, who spend their time in importance and neediness.
Some of us have this now. Others will never be free. Laura Willowes is given the choice, although she doesn't know it. An odd little gem of a book.