Warner’s writing marks her departure from normative encounters with landscape; her knowledge of space is arrived at not through map-reading or obeisance to marked footpaths, but through embodied experience. Becoming lost on the marsh, it is through her bodily awareness of her surroundings that Warner inhabits her environment. For Sukey, the marsh makes itself known to her through texture and smell, ‘sensations of pleasure’ which orientate her (TH, 26); Fortune, too, familiarises himself with the tropical strangeness of Fanua by ‘taking an interest in his sensations’. 34 In these ways Warner stages landscape encounter through the body, negotiating time and space not through normative or empirical means but through lived experience. Sara Ahmed writes, ‘Orientations are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places’. 35 Ahmed’s queer phenomenology is situated within an emergent discourse in queer studies that stresses the connections between queer identity, time and space. 36 As queer theory becomes increasingly attuned to the modernist canon, contemporary discourses of queer time and space can shed new light on Warner’s writing, in which a sustained spatiality presents a politics of citizenship in which marginalised sexualities and subjectivities are constructed and explored.

And perhaps more than ever 2017 is the time for stories about waking up from the drowsiness of lives cocooned by social expectations and respectability politics and be pointed toward modes of being that are idiosyncratically imagined and intentionally pursued. Part 1 is all charming, "quintessentially" English eccentricities—a broad assortment of kooky extended family members, whimsical family heirlooms hoarded in drawing rooms, teatime and other daily rituals, and the like; this is the life of one Laura Willowes, quietly sloughed into a life of genteel spinsterhood, and cloistered in the tiny spare room in a brother’s family home in London. She slowly transforms into docile “Aunt Lolly” after being christened as such by a baby niece—her identity is so nondescript that even she doesn’t quite register her very name is no longer her own.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. Kahan, Benjamin A. Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Honestly, I had no idea what I was about to read other than I knew that something very, very odd, strange and uncanny was going to happen. That’s it. So at the start of this slim little novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the prose and the way in which we are right from the start being told that this character was to be a victim of sorts of her class and time. When we meet Laura “Lolly” Willowes, her father has just passed away and Laura is automatically to be sent to live in the household of one of her brothers in London. You see, Laura is a 28 year old unmarried woman who loved her father and knew nothing but a life in his house that enabled her to do as she pleased. However, that carefree life in the country becomes a more restrictive one when she moves to London. CornishVaughan. The Scenery of England (London: Council for the Preservation of Rural England, 1932). I thought the book was going to focus more on her trials as a spinster in the 1920s England. It did to some extent but it took such an odd, unexpected turn towards the end when Lolly moves away to a little hamlet and then realizes that she’s a witch. I didn’t really feel as though the story had developed sufficiently in that direction to make me believe that incident was credible.

A strange little book, Lolly Willowes is not what I thought it was going to be at all. I was more intrigued by the first and second parts which dealt with the life Laura Willowes leads, first as a housekeeper and companion for her father, after the death of her mother and then by her forced move to her oldest brother's house where she becomes a companion and helper to her sister-in-law. She is not allowed any freedom of her own, even when they go on vacation, Aunt Lolly, as the children call her, can not even take a walk by herself, she must be on hand to watch the children. GarrityJane. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 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. The women in Laura’s life who perform gender better than she does, who read the right books, got the right look, the right husband, the right house in London and the right holiday spots in the country or by the seaside, don’t have lives that look more open or fulfilling than her own. They are mothers, menders, and spoilers of husbands less capable than themselves. Of the sister-in-law with whom she lives for much of the book, Laura thinks, “She was slightly self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she yielded to Henry’s judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices.” This constant indulgence by his wife changes Henry’s “natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view.” A good wife makes a worse husband. Lolly Willowes explores the ways that patriarchy can quietly, gently, lovingly deform a woman’s entire life.McRuerRobert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 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. Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you:

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: AhmedSara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to relinquish her name also.”

Success!

After a while, Titus decides to move from his lodgings in Bloomsbury to Great Mop and be a writer, rather than managing the family business. Titus's renewed social and domestic reliance on Laura make her feel frustrated that even living in the Chilterns she cannot escape the duties expected of women. When out walking, she makes a pact with a force that she takes to be Satan, to be free from such duties. On returning to her lodgings, she discovers a kitten, whom she takes to be Satan's emissary, and names him Vinegar, in reference to an old picture of witches' familiars. Subsequently, her landlady takes her to a Witches' Sabbath attended by many of the villagers. Waters, Sarah (2012). "Sylvia Townsend Warner: the neglected writer". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 July 2016.

I'm of two minds about this, though. I loved the imagery, and whole passages that made me want to applaud. Lolly goes to nurse, late in the First World War. The recruiting posters have bleached. By the time the Great War had ended, the world was a bit tipsy. Perhaps the strongest survivors were the women who had worked in the factories and found themselves with extra money, more freedom, and a yearning for more rights. The 1920s brought somewhat liberated young women to the forefront, as they were the remaining half of the wiped-out generation. This book is really a reflection of that new fast-moving world, as young Lolly Willowes decides to start doing her life the way she wants it done and not pre-war style.SwaabPeter. ‘The Queerness of Lolly Willowes’, The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 2010, pp. 29–52. Throughout the rest of the novel, Townsend Warner evokes the wild majesty of the land surrounding Great Mop. As Laura goes on long solitary walks through the lanes, fields, and forests, she opens up more and more to the wilderness around her, and in doing so, taps into a piece of herself that had remained buried until then. Laura also becomes aware of a darker power surrounding her.