Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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£4.995 FREE Shipping

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Her first published book was the 1925 poetry collection The Espalier, which was praised by A E Housman and Arthur Quiller-Couch. [11] She was encouraged to write fiction by David Garnett. [12] Warner's novels included Lolly Willowes (1926), Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), Summer Will Show (1936), and The Corner That Held Them (1948). [13] Recurring themes are evident in a number of her works. These include a rejection of Christianity (in Mr Fortune's Maggot, and in Lolly Willowes, where the protagonist becomes a witch); the position of women in patriarchal societies ( Lolly Willowes, Summer Will Show, The Corner that Held Them); ambiguous sexuality, or bisexuality ( Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune's Maggot, Summer Will Show); and lyrical descriptions of landscape. [ citation needed] Mr Fortune's Maggot, about a missionary in the Pacific Islands, has been described as a "satirical, anti-imperialist novel". [14] In Summer Will Show, the heroine, Sophia Willoughby, travels to Paris during the 1848 Revolution and falls in love with a woman. [15] The Corner That Held Them (1948) focuses on the lives of a community of nuns in a medieval convent. [15] They condoned this extravagance, yet they mistrusted it. Time justified them in their mistrust. Like many stupid people, they possessed acute instincts. `He that is unfaithful in little things…’ Caroline would say when the children forgot to wind up their watches. Their instinct told them that the same truth applies to extravagance in little things. They were wiser than they knew. When Laura’s extravagance in great things came it staggered them so completely that they forgot how judiciously they had suspected it beforehand.” p. 82 Titus, a kind man, a good nephew, the best and closest of Laura’s family, is still unable to enter her world without loving her into pain and nightmarish alienation from herself and from nature. Walking with Titus in the hills and woods, Laura feels “the spirit of the place withdraw itself further from her.” She feels it as an animate rejection by the land. If she walks it as an aunt with a nephew, soon she will only be able to walk it as an aunt with her nephew. SquierSusan Merrill. Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘Now! Now!’ it said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from the trees that it might stare at her more imperiously.”

To amuse herself she had cut the dough into likenesses of the village people. Curious developments took place in the baking. Being a person, in this world, is a failure. It is a failure to be always and ever living up to what one should be doing, which, after all, as Lolly achingly feels over and over again- isn’t such a problem when someone just wants you to wind the yarn, or just help mend this one sheet. But eventually the dust settles and Laura (who tries and tries again to emerge from behind Lolly) grows so tired of it that taking to her bed ill for two weeks is a blessed relief- all the understanding of her desire to do nothing (which is the only coded way she can express her real desire for independence) that would not have been there otherwise is hers. It offers even more understanding of the “fashionable” invalid of the era. There are few alternatives for a woman who desires to be independent but living on her own in a town of 200 people called Great Mop. But even then, she is not safe until she makes a deal with the devil.

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The novel flows beautifully, and has many lines like this: "The bees droned in the motionless lime trees" (38). Sensitive images like that do many things: they show the passion for the countryside (as I mentioned), and also give the reader a sense of time, and place, and mood, and Lolly's interior thoughts. These carefully-crafted sentences are not random poetic lines dropped into the text but part and parcel of this novel's pace and tone of voice. In a pivotal scene, Lolly is in a shop room when she goes into a sort of meditative trance; the room falls quiet like she's alone outdoors: "No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a riper plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows" (80). And plus, it didn’t seem to make sense that to complete her rejection of the cloying overbearing insufferable men of her family Miss Willowes would find it necessary to place herself in the power of another big strong male figure.

I can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it was more of a shoulda coulda woulda. Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best. 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: This is a book about witches. But when I finally put this book down last night, I mostly just thought about my father. Laura’s individuality is absorbed by her family. Even her name is changed to Lolly when one of her nieces cannot pronounce “Laura,” after which no one in her family calls her Laura again. Townsend Warner presents Laura as satisfied with her life with her father, where she takes on the role of housekeeper after her mother’s death. She carries out her life to the rhythm of family traditions and the customs of the village. And she even follows her own version of her father’s trade in brewing:a something that was dark and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels, and by the voices of the birds of ill omen. Merleau-PontyMaurice. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by SmithColin (London: Routledge, 1962). Similarly, in her 2012 review of the novel, Lucy Scholes takes note of the feminist focus of the novel, as well as the fact that it predates the better known A Room of One's Own: "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." [5] AlexanderNeal, and JamesMoran (eds.). Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). DaviesGill, MalcolmDavid and SimonsJohn (eds.). Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner: English Novelist, 1893–1978 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).



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