Reviews

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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daja57's review against another edition

5.0

Laura Willowes is a single lady in the early years of the twentieth century. She grows up in the countryside with her family and then, after her parents are dead, she goes to live with her elder brother and his wife in London. For twenty years she is the poor relative, the maiden aunt, looking after her nieces, resisting any attempt to marry her off. Then she decides to move to a little village in the Cotswolds and begins a second career as a witch.

So what starts as a Jane Austen-style comedy of manners suddenly lurches into fantasy. Although, as one of my U3A reading group pointed out, one can read all the strange events, even the encounter with the devil, as real world occurrences happening to a woman whose imagination has perhaps run away with her.

The writing is elegant and witty and beautiful; it reminded me of the work of Jane Austen and E M Forster. It was STW's debut novel and published in 1926 and I was a little surprised that it contained no trace of the great modernist novels that were being published around that time, such as Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce or even Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf. Apart from the plot twist of witchcraft (which is carefully foreshadowed, even in the first half of the book which deals with her repressed upper middle class life), it was very conventional. But the prose is wonderful.

I was less enamoured of the propaganda aspect of the novel. It is this that has earned the author the acclaim of being a (proto) feminist. But it seemed to me that she is very unreflective. At one point she criticises a character thus: "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.” But this is exactly what the author herself does. Virtually all the characters, women as well as men, apart from the protagonist, are weighed and found wanting.

But the main character herself could be considered to be a self-centred parasite. In the first part of the book she is given bed and board with her brother's family and feels repressed and taken-for-granted when she is expected to contribute to the household by looking after her nieces. She longs for independence and, eventually, she goes off to the countryside where she has her bed and board provided by a lower class landlady in exchange for her modest private income. In other words, she seeks all the benefits of the world without wishing to incur any of the obligations. She contributes nothing. And it is the other characters who are held up to ridicule!

Similarly, the author repeatedly extols the virtues of the countryside and denigrates London. But hers is a very romantic version of the countryside. Her protagonist takes long walks in the country but never (except briefly and temporarily when she works with hens, a little like the way women during the first world war were briefly and temporarily employed, as the author herself was, in munitions factories) gets involved in it. She produces nothing. She never even gets muddy.

I understand the author became a communist. Recently I read The Patrician (published in 1911) by John Galsworthy, the author who wrote Forsyte Saga, and he was able to see and present arguments both for and against the establishment: I couldn't decide which side of the fence he was on until over half way through. (though I think in the end he is fundamentally conservative). In Lolly Willowes I can discern not even a glimmer of class consciousness.

oxnard_montalvo's review against another edition

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Just delightful. I should have read it at the age of 15; Lolly Willowes is a lovely, unassuming heroine, who comes into her own rather late in life, but all the same, it's a cheerful reminder that it is never too late to change your circumstances and embrace who you really are. Granted, Lolly is unemcumbered by maternal duties, she has an income (though not the ready control of it), she has means and comes from a place of relative economic priviledge. Even so, her ambitions are so modest, you root for her to acheive them. She is content and satisfied, solitude without being lonely.

Particularly loved the way the seasonal changes were described; so vivid and beautifully affectionate. Just a great book about nature, the desire to slough off the pressures of family and convention, and live simply.