Love it as he might, with all the deep Willowes love for country sights and smells, love he never so intimately and soberly, his love must be a horror to her. It was different in kind from hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well, and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it were a body. The book] I’ll be pressing into people’s hands forever is “Lolly Willowes,” the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness.” - Helen Macdonald in The New York Times Book Review's “By the Book." 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.

SquierSusan Merrill. Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). As I've already said, it seemed immediately obvious to me why Sylvia T-W would have been one of Virago's first Modern Classic authors. In Lolly Willowes, at least, the content and thematic pulse alone - with its steady focus on the enforced dependency of women - are enough to justify her inclusion in any women's canon. There's also the beauty of the writing, the light, timeless language and the constant stream of cleverly uneasy imagery. (When Lolly cooks her scones in the shape of Great Mop villagers and pets, for instance, "Mr Saunter ate the strange shapes without comment, quietly splitting open the villagers and buttering them". Lovely.) a b Jane Dowson. Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge, 1996; ISBN 0-415-13095-6 (pp. 149–58). I’ve tried to find a representative passage short enough to reproduce here so readers don’t imagine that I’m making things up but I can’t so I’ll just throw in two entirely random quotes from pp. 58-9 and hope you can see what I mean, however faintly: The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets up the situation against which Lolly rebels by narrating the events in her life that bring her to live with her eldest brother, Henry; his wife, Caroline; and their two daughters, Fancy and Marion, in London. The Willowes are an upper middle class family that has made their money in breweries and (like most of the non-noble gentry of that era) aspired to live like the nobility - landed estates, proper marriages, the stifling conformity of late Victorian England, and all that. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett (whose virtues I've praised elsewhere), Warner evinces little liking for this society but her chidings are less acerbic, more gentle, and her heroine (at least in this, her first novel that I've read) successfully leaves it behind, unlike Compton-Burnett's, who usually wind up as trapped in the end as at the beginning: "But on the following summer the sandbags had rotted and burst and the barbed-wire had been absorbed into the farmer's fences. So, Laura thought, such warlike phenomena as Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Fancy's second husband, and Jemima and Rosalind, Fancy's two daughters, might well disappear off the family landscape. Mr. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. Jemima and Rosalind were more obtrusive. Here was a new generation to call her Aunt Lolly and find her as indispensable as did the last."KnollBruce. ‘“An Existence Doled Out”: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 344–363. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her, just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not remembered to use either.”

MillerSimon. ‘Urban Dreams in Rural Reality: Land and Landscape in English Culture, 1920–45’, Rural History 6, no. 1 (1995), pp. 89–102.This striking stor CornishVaughan. The Scenery of England (London: Council for the Preservation of Rural England, 1932).

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. LightAlison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991). Kahan, Benjamin A. Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced h Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death. 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. I am deathly allergic to witty foreplay of the never ending sort. In more detailed terms, this is a category comprised of works written in the very worst vein of Austen, all fluffy gilt and jocular surface with none of said author's craft or deep meditation on human pathos. Now, Lolly Willowes did have some variation to its name, but when one begins with family lineage and ends with bantering dialogue and leaves little to gnaw upon between the two, it all comes off as very English. Much like works by white males, there's a lot of English type stuff glutting the literature realms, so if one wants to be good, one must be very, very, very good. You see, it's a matter of dilution, and not much can be done if a work runs headlong into losing itself in the crowd. RoseGillian. Feminist Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).

Silvia Townsend Warner…is perhaps the most unjustly neglected of all the modern masters of fiction. She is remembered as a writer of historical novels, but her novels are written with such extraordinary immediacy that they stretch the possibilities of long-disparaged genera and blur the distinction between historical fiction and serious literature….Like the controversial movie Thelma and Louise, Lolly Willowesis [a] Rorschach blot that might suggest liberation to some readers and folly to others. It is an edgy tale that suggests how taking control of one’s own life might entail losing control; it might even entail an inexorable drift toward an unknown and possibly disastrous fate. In short, Lolly Willoweswould be an ideal book-club selection, sure to spark a rousing discussion. The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the good sense of their forbears. Finding that 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 behavior imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.”Gender under patriarchy can’t help but harm women. It harms men, too, but it offers particular benefits that make that harm worthwhile for a whole lot of men. Gender under capitalist patriarchy is necessarily impossible. It isn’t a coincidence that gendered expectations are contradictory. The contradictions make it impossible to fulfill those expectations, and the impossibility places it always just out of reach, fixable with the right product, new look, new attitude, new behavior. For women under capitalist patriarchy, failing to fulfill gendered expectations is financially punished, but, crucially, so is fulfilling those expectations reasonably well. You might get the job or the marriage by being attractive and tidy and correctly female, but the rise to authority and true ownership of wealth is unlikely to follow. Fulfilling femininity to the satisfaction of men is nearly always an argument against your own potential. Although Laura is filling an established social role, she grows more and more dissatisfied with her position. Townsend Warner captures this growing sense of longing masterfully -- and by couching them in terms of landscape and nature, she provides a strong counterpoint to Laura’s domesticated life in front of her brother’s fireplace: GarrityJane. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). BluntAlison, and RoseGillian (eds.). Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (London: Guilford Press, 1994). The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. UCL Press; ISSN 2398-0605. Open access journal available free online.