Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

As you can imagine, our political discussions did not (and still don’t) end well for me- I always end up sounding like a petulant child somehow and he’s still “father,” patient, kind, waiting for me to figure it out. Along the way, there are intertexts aplenty - I was especially surprised to find objects and landscapes given sentient feelings and even voices, something I associate with Katherine Mansfield. 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. I think you’d like it a lot – you just need to be willing to suspend disbelief when the story changes tack.

While I haven’t read the Woolf, I understand that it taps into a similar theme – a woman’s need to establish some kind of a meaningful life for herself without the interference or dominance of others. Changing topic completely, I saw a film that might interest you at the London Film Festival today: Happy as Lazzaro, directed by Alice Rohrwacher.When Laura Willowes’s beloved father dies, she is absorbed in the household of her brother and his family. Because of the fine dust of the system of obligations he inherited from a generation wrapped up in values like Lolly’s, I really don’t think I officially met my dad as a person until I turned 21. We have a witches sabbath (this turns out to consist of folk dancing) and we have friendly chats with Satan, the Evil One, re-configured as the Cosy One. 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. There is a darkness in Lolly Willowes that is almost a mirror image of a holy lady, with everything backward and reversed.

This starts out in fairly conventional style but veers then plunges into not-quite supernatural and not-quite rustic comedic fantasy as Lolly absorbs the spirits of the earth, the woods and the weather. 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. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. By now, we are in the 1920s where it is becoming a little easier for women to branch out and gain some independence for themselves. Now, for sure, Lolly Willowes is a shoo-in for The 100 Most Charming Oddities in English but one of the all time best?Wolf-Saunders, Fancy’s second husband, and Jemima and Rosalind, Fancy’s two daughters, might well disappear off the family landscape. She has such a turn of phrase – I’ve never forgotten Caroline’s “almost mystical sense of the validity of small things”.

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. It is the story of a middle-aged spinster who moves to a country village to escape her controlling relatives and takes up the practice of witchcraft. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces. Part 1 is all charming, "quintessentially" English eccentricities—a broad assortment of kooky extended family members, whimsical family heirlooms hoarded in drawing rooms, teatime and other daily rituals, and the like; this is the life of one Laura Willowes, quietly sloughed into a life of genteel spinsterhood, and cloistered in the tiny spare room in a brother’s family home in London.Still, there she was, and Henry was right—they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself. Somehow, that age was like Aurora’s sixteenth birthday and triggered a magic spell that meant that “duty” could be relaxed a little- only a little, and only gradually, but it happened. His friends gave his car the nickname “Squirrel” in college and made fun of him for being unable to fix it.

After that she is effortlessly absorbed into her brother’s family as a Useful Aunt to perform child minding and doily re-arranging tasks and pretend to enjoy ghastly conversations at miserable dinner parties for twenty years. In reality, marriage holds little appeal for Laura, and she remains relatively satisfied with her position in life. This is my first Sylvia Townsend Warner, but if you know her other writing, perhaps you can guess what I mean. 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….It did to some extent but it took such an odd, unexpected turn towards the end when Lolly moves away to a little hamlet and then realizes that she’s a witch. I loved how the beginning is so conventional but then becomes less and less conventional and as you say surprising.