Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I found it a bit delightful in the beginning, but midway through it changes direction and becomes almost another kind of tale. But while her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely seaboards, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood.

One of the ideas and themes that Warner has set out to tackle in this story of Lolly Willowes is how a patriarchal society can diminish, in a quiet and loving way, a woman’s life. You see, it's a matter of dilution, and not much can be done if a work runs headlong into losing itself in the crowd. She went up to the top of Cubbey Ridge, past the ruined windmill that clattered with its torn sails. It’s been so long since I’ve made it out of the city that I’m afraid reading this book might well jolt me into throwing all that up and heading for the woods. Divested of her easily-worn honors as mistress of the household, shorn of her long meandering country days, sleeping in a smart brass bedstead instead of her old and rather pompous four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and performing unaccustomed duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different person.She felt as though she had awoken, unchanged, from a twenty-years slumber, to find them almost unrecognizable. I blame everything that Lolly Willowes rebels against in this book for the fact that I didn’t really meet my dad until four years ago. While I suspect most readers will know, as I did, the general trajectory of the narrative, I think the less known the better so will leave it at that. Laura, relieved, meets Satan at Mulgrave Folly and tells him that women are like 'sticks of dynamite' waiting to explode and that all women are witches even 'if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it's there – ready!

Not only has Henry taken Laura’s goodwill for granted for so many years, but he has also managed to be careless with her capital, effectively reducing her inheritance by half.So yes a feminist novel and while the final third is quite strange and didn’t quite work for me (I didn’t see why being a witch meant Satanism), it was a satisfying read. Their beliefs and preferences were not the only ones present in England in 1902, but they were strongly held, and not only by the Willowes. So, reduced circumstances and all, Laura heads off to Great Mop where she must now take rooms in a cottage run by a somewhat idiosyncratic landlady, Mrs Leak. 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 of ill-omen.

That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business to satisfy our passion for adventure…. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that the material is credited and referenced to JacquiWine’s Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War.

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. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans…. Da Londra si trasferisce a Great Mop, paesino sperduto e poco conosciuto, dove a poco a poco riesce a identificare e a definire quell’ansia che la assale sempre più spesso.