Rural Hours by Harriet Baker review – the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann
Three writers’ pastoral years are beautifully observed in this group biography but seem little more than tangential to their work
On Easter Monday 1930, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was walking along a lane in East Chaldon, Dorset, when she arrived at an unappetising-looking cottage, its muddy stucco powerfully redolent – to most people, at least – of damp and disheartenment. She knew already it was for sale, and having borrowed a set of keys from a nearby pub, she went inside for a closer look. For her, if for no one else, its shabby severity was an essential part of its attraction. So what if it had no electricity or running water? If the surveyor would later describe it as undesirable? Such cons were her get-out clause; her exoneration from naughty “bourgeois cravings”. Unlike other down-from-London types, she wouldn’t pinch the best house from the locals. She would jump on the very worst house, and hope not to crash through any rotten floorboards as she did. Reader, she bought it, warts and all.
Virago Modern Classics have done the reader no favours in managing expectations by publishing this in a twee edition illustrated with a strangely distorted ginger cat, and a quote from John Updike, author of yesterday’s reviewed novel, describing this as “witty, eerie, tender”. (How many times have you said to yourself, “You know what I need to read right now is a funny but scary but romantic novel”?)
ylvia Townsend Warner's first novel (published in 1926) begins with 28-year-old Lolly Willowes being sent, "as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will", to live with her brother and his family after the death of her father. She is "so useful and obliging" but after 19 years finds her senses dulled and her mind "groping after something that eluded her experience".
Escape beckons when she decides to move to the village of Great Mop in the Chilterns. And here, this satirical social commentary takes a turn towards the fantastic as Lolly sells her soul to the devil – "a kind of black knight, wandering about and succouring decayed gentlewomen" – and becomes a witch.
Lolly's own realisation of what she has done strikes with the rapidity and venom of "a snake-bite in the brain", just as the novel sharply undercuts its genteel appearance to reveal a dark and visceral heart riddled with gloriously uneasy images (a young woman eats "with the stealthy persistence of a bitch that gives suck").
Lolly Willowes calls for "a life of one's own" three years before Virginia Woolf's impassioned cry for a room. "We have more need of you," she explains to the devil. "Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance." 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.
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.
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
I
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).
Three More From Sylvia Townsend Warner
Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927); Summer Will Show (1936); The Corner that Held Them (1948).
