Monday, September 15, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 52 / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 52

Lolly Willowes

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

(1926)

A young woman escapes convention by becoming a witch in this original satire about England after the first world war

Robert McCrum
Monday 15 September 2014

n 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.

Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a twentysomething middle-class Englishwoman who, on the death of her father, at first becomes a conventional maiden aunt living with her brother in London. Then, "groping after something", she makes a bid for personal freedom, an escape to Great Mop, "a secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns", where she finds herself happily becoming a witch in communion with the devil.

In the 1920s, the search for a life (or room) of one's own was a topical theme. The war had liberated millions of women (Townsend Warner had worked in a munitions factory) and wiped out a generation of young men. The role and responsibilities of widows and spinsters was a subject taken up by many writers, from Vera Brittain to DH Lawrence. Lolly addresses it when, having embraced her witchy self, she has a long conversation with a middle-aged country gent who turns out to be Satan. "The one thing all women hate," she tells him, "is to be thought dull."

Sylvia Townsend Warner's whimsical take on postwar womanhood and the quest for meaning, subtitled "The Loving Huntsman", has a sharp edge, a satirical eye and a covert, untamed, eroticism. Townsend Warner was an unconventional lesbian. For her, inter-war women's potential was what mattered most. Women, says Lolly to the devil, "know they are dynamite" and simply long for "the concussion that may justify them".

For Townsend Warner, this "concussion" came a few years after the triumphant publication of Lolly Willowes. She fell in love with the poet Valentine Acland, and spent the rest of her life in Dorset. From the 1930s to 70s, she contributed short stories to the New Yorker. She died in 1978.

A Note on the Text

On publication Lolly Willowes did well with the London critical establishment, but made a special hit in France (shortlisted for the Prix Femina) and the US, where it was selected as an inaugural Book-of-the-Month title for the newly launched book club. Sylvia Townsend Warner's relationship with her American readers was cemented in 1929 when she was appointed guest editor of the New York Herald Tribune and subsequently became a long-term contributor of short stories to the New Yorker. The MS of Lolly Willowes was kept on display in the New York Public Library until the 1960s next to manuscripts by Woolf and Thackeray. The novel remains Townsend Warner's chief claim to fame, though her life as a lesbian and a communist gives her biography a frisson of passion and politics. For more about the literary career of this remarkable woman, the essential texts are Claire Harman's biography, Sylvia Townsend Warner (London, 1989) and I'll Stand By You: Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Acland, edited by Susanna Pinney (London, 1998).