ButtsMary. ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1925). In ‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998). 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.” 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.

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. 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 from pp. 58-9 and hope you can see what I mean, however faintly:

The Shakespeare Sessions

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. 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.

Kristen Hanley Cardozo is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in English literature. She is working on a dissertation on the figure of the brute in 19th-century Brit lit. a something that was dark 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 the birds of ill omen. KnollBruce. ‘“An Existence Doled Out”: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 344–363.

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The sole outlet for Laura’s desires remains the flowers she buys, even in the winter, to fill up her room, a habit in which she persists although Caroline quietly views it as a terrible extravagance. One day, when running an errand, Laura is drawn to a display of preserves from the county and chrysanthemums. As she looks at them, she falls into a revery that seems both to point to her country past and to look ahead to a future in a solitary orchard: Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.”

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 Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to every one who supported a better case than he.” 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.”After a while, Titus decides to move from his lodgings in Bloomsbury to Great Mop and be a writer, rather than managing the family business. Titus's renewed social and domestic reliance on Laura make her feel frustrated that even living in the Chilterns she cannot escape the duties expected of women. When out walking, she makes a pact with a force that she takes to be Satan, to be free from such duties. On returning to her lodgings, she discovers a kitten, whom she takes to be Satan's emissary, and names him Vinegar, in reference to an old picture of witches' familiars. Subsequently, her landlady takes her to a Witches' Sabbath attended by many of the villagers.