Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). ‘“Penn Country” Branch, Rules, Aims, Objects and Membership, With an Introduction by Ralph M. Robinson’, Pamphlet No. 1, February 1931. Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel is about a woman being smothered by expectations, and how she breaks free

I am deathly allergic to witty foreplay of the never ending sort. In more detailed terms, this is a category comprised of works written in the very worst vein of Austen, all fluffy gilt and jocular surface with none of said author's craft or deep meditation on human pathos. Now, Lolly Willowes did have some variation to its name, but when one begins with family lineage and ends with bantering dialogue and leaves little to gnaw upon between the two, it all comes off as very English. Much like works by white males, there's a lot of English type stuff glutting the literature realms, so if one wants to be good, one must be very, very, very good. 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. 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 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." 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. Becoming lost on the marsh, it is through her bodily awareness of her surroundings that Warner inhabits her environment. For Sukey, the marsh makes itself known to her through texture and smell, ‘sensations of pleasure’ which orientate her (TH, 26); Fortune, too, familiarises himself with the tropical strangeness of Fanua by ‘taking an interest in his sensations’. 34 In these ways Warner stages landscape encounter through the body, negotiating time and space not through normative or empirical means but through lived experience. Sara Ahmed writes, ‘Orientations are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places’. 35 Ahmed’s queer phenomenology is situated within an emergent discourse in queer studies that stresses the connections between queer identity, time and space. 36 As queer theory becomes increasingly attuned to the modernist canon, contemporary discourses of queer time and space can shed new light on Warner’s writing, in which a sustained spatiality presents a politics of citizenship in which marginalised sexualities and subjectivities are constructed and explored. 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]HalberstamJudith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). McRuerRobert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about. This is my first Sylvia Townsend Warner, but if you know her other writing, perhaps you can guess what I mean. If you don’t want to read the book and want to know what I mean, it’s there in the first line of at least one Goodreads review. I rarely give reading advice, but I don’t recommend looking at that review if you plan on reading this. Whatever you do, as per usual, read the introduction after the novel.

This is a book about witches. But when I finally put this book down last night, I mostly just thought about my father. 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.” p. 82 Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuthThis new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had thought of it as a denial of winter, a green spur that thrust through a tyrant's rusty armor. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.” 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 everyone who supported a better case than he. 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.’”