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| Sylvia Townsend Warner |
Books of defiance
Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes is 'a great shout of life'
Defying the genteel harness of Edwardian spinsterhood, this novel’s heroine instead becomes a witch and dallies with Satan himself
Wednesday 28 December 2016
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel Lolly Willowes is an act of defiance that gladdens the soul. Put simply, it’s the story of a woman who becomes a witch – but it will subvert any expectations prompted by that synopsis as gleefully as it subverts every theme it touches on: gender roles, family love, social convention, religious propriety.
Born into a stuffy, self-satisfied family who are content to stay in the Victorian era while the world changes around them, Laura Willowes is a dreamy young woman with no interest in marriage. On the death of her father, it seems quite natural that she be “absorbed into the household” of her brother Henry and his wife Caroline “like a piece of family property forgotten in the will”. In their London home, she becomes indispensable “Aunt Lolly”, forever obliged and obliging to others, the only sign of her self-will the extravagant hothouse flowers she sneaks into the mean territory of her small bedroom each winter.
Until the day Lolly’s inchoate longing for solitude and rural seclusion – the urge to be “standing alone in a darkening orchard” – crystallises in the snap decision to move to a small village in the Chilterns, Great Mop. “‘I’ve never even heard of the place!’ said Henry conclusively.” But for once Lolly comes to her own conclusions and in the face of her family’s amazed disapproval off she goes: to escape her obligations, to gain that all-important Room of One’s Own – and to attend bacchanalian witches’ sabbaths and conduct matter-of-fact chats on hillsides with Satan. Lolly characterises him as “a kind of black knight, wandering about and succouring decayed gentlewomen”, seducing a spinster’s soul “when no one else would give a look at her body even!” As Sarah Waters puts it in her excellent essay, he “pays [women] the compliment of pursuing them and then, having bagged them, performs the even more valuable service of leaving them alone”.
The novel, Townsend Warner’s first, was a hit, but she was dismayed to see many take its aura of genteel whimsy and oh-so-English fantasy at face value. Admirers, she complained to a friend, “told me that it was charming, that it was distinguished, and my mother said it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And my heart sank lower and lower; I felt as though I had tried to make a sword, only to be told what a pretty pattern there was on the blade.”
For there is steel in Lolly Willows, though much of its bite and danger is hidden, even from Lolly herself. There is the ancient power of myth and landscape, the dark woods and lanes through which Lolly blithely strolls and which feel as though they could swallow her up at any moment. Satan is an understatedly ambiguous figure; a “loving huntsman” he may be, as the subtitle has it, but has Lolly simply passed from the possession of one male to another? And almost entirely off the page we sense the seismic social upheaval of war and economic turmoil, the slaughter of a generation of young men, the long-standing systematic repression of women that is only slowly beginning to lift, and seemingly too late for Lolly. Only once does she cast her plight in terms of political anger: “If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament … the Bank of England, Prostitution … ”
Lolly doesn’t forgive the unforgivable; she simply walks away. Henry and Caroline, she realised in London, “were half hidden under their accumulations – accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience”. As Townsend Warner puts it in what is one of my favourite passages, for its sure-footed mix of mundanity and exaggeration:
They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience of normal boilers and normal policemen.
Stripped of convention, of safety and habit, Lolly opens herself up to a different reality. She defies society as well as everything society has raised her to be. Her future is uncertain, but it is free, and the novel that houses her is a great shout of life and individuality.
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