Dave's Book Blog: "Lolly Willowes" by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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, as is shown time and again in the selected quotes, 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.

I suppose the issue that I have isn't with this book, because I think it is beautifully written and an interesting story and I am keen to read other books by this author. But some people seem to like or dislike a book because of what it says rather than how it says it. That shouldn't be a basis for judgement.

Selected Quotes:

“She thought of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed streets and squares ... complying with the sealed orders of the future.” (part one)
“Finding their well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.” (part one)
“One of her earliest pleasures had been to go with Everard to the brewery and look into the great vats while he, holding her firmly with his left hand, with his right plunged a long stick through the clotted froth.” (part one)
“He observed gloomily that daughters could be very expensive now that so much fuss was being made about the education of women.” (part one)
“She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years, and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden snowstorms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness and rigour cast upon her.” (part one)
“Time went faster than the embroidery did. She had actually a sensation that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good deal of background.” (part one)
“Laura, opening the third drawer of the large mahogany wardrobe, had commented upon the beautiful orderliness with which Caroline's body linen was arranged therein. ‘We have our example’, said Caroline. ‘The grave-clothes were folded in the tomb’.” (part one)
“The law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. 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.” (part one)
“A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline's thoughts ... she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. it was well to be loved, to be necessary to other people.” (part one)
“She compared herself to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and nights the increasing pull of the earth below.” (part two)
“ the recumbent autumnal graces of the countryside.” (part two)
“Even Henry and Caroline ... were half hidden under their accumulations - accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience.” (part two)
“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions.” (part two)
“She had no thoughts; her mind was swept as clean and empty as the heavens.” (part two)
“So had Adam been the noblest work of nature, when he walked out among the beasts, sole overseer of the garden, intact, with all his ribs about him, his equilibrium as yet untroubled by Eve.” (part two)
“This new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had thought of it as a denial of winter, a green Spear that thrust through a tyrant's rusty armour. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.” (part two)
“The cult of the summer months was a piece of cockney obtuseness.” (part two)
“He liked it because he was in possession.” (part three)
“The first hour was well enough, but after that came increasing listlessness and boredom; the effort, when one danced again with the same partner, not to say the same things, combined with the obligation to say something rather like them.” (part three)
“Not one of the monuments and tinkering of man could impose on the Satanic mind. The Vatican and the Crystal Palace, and all the neat human nest-boxes in Rows, Balham and Fulham and the Cromwell Road ... they went flop like card-houses ... Wolves howled through the streets of Paris, the foxes played in the throne room of Schonbrunn, and in the basement at Apsley Terrace the mammoth slowly revolved, trampling out its lair.” (part three)
“Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent on others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance.” (part three)
“Sin and Grace, and God ... and St Paul. All men's things, like politics, or mathematics.” (part three)
“One doesn't become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick.” (part three)
“I encourage you to talk, not that I may know all your thoughts, but that you may.” (part three)