Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. 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.

After her father’s death, she moves to London ‘feeling rather as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will’, and is subsequently ‘absorbed’ into Henry’s household (LW, 9). 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. The marsh, the saltings, and the sea beyond, have shaped Sukey’s subjectivity; the landscape enables and emboldens her emergent interiority, its strangeness reflecting her own.

Mary Jacobs, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Politics of the English Pastoral 1925–1934’, in Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893–1978, ed. Let her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret, if she had one; with autumn it might come back to question her. It was not beauty at all that she wanted, or depressed though she was, she would have bought a ticket to somewhere or other upon the Metropolitan railway and gone out to see the recumbent autumnal graces of the country-side.

The landscape responds to and communicates her desire for space: ‘She felt that nothing could ever again disturb her peace. The two women became committed members of the Communist Party, and in 1937, they travelled together to Spain during the Civil War to try to stop the spread of Fascism. In her ambiguously all-encompassing ‘and other we might include Warner’s proto-queer protagonists: Laura, with her knowledge of wild herbs and magic; Fortune, troubled by homosexual desire; the ‘primitive’ Lueli; Sukey, associated with liminal landscapes; and the disabled Eric.She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside the secret, whatever it was. The End of the Affair': A Correspondence between Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, with an Introduction by Ailsa Granne and Peter Haring Judd".

When I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses – through the ear, through the eye, and through certain imperishable scents’. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), pp. The book] I’ll be pressing into people’s hands forever is “Lolly Willowes,” the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner.Warner's short stories include the collections A Moral Ending and Other Stories, The Salutation, More Joy in Heaven, The Cat's Cradle Book, A Garland of Straw, The Museum of Cheats. Jeremy Burchardt describes the rapid urban developments of the 1920s and 1930s as an ‘intense phase of suburban growth’ in Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800 (London: I. She was a self-proclaimed ‘townee’, tripping to the coast in a cotton dress, leisure map in hand, to seek respite from urban living. Setting out in 1922, after abandoning her map, she traversed the liminal marsh landscape in contented solitude. Rural environments became sites of ideological investment in which preservationists responded to interwar uncertainties of ‘national purpose and identity, […] the question of what England stood for’.