In short, I came here looking for a kinswoman to Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and found something very nice, very cute, and ultimately not what I needed. Somehow, that age was like Aurora’s sixteenth birthday and triggered a magic spell that meant that “duty” could be relaxed a little- only a little, and only gradually, but it happened. While she proves herself to be a reliable and trustworthy companion, Laura is often left feeling somewhat inadequate and taken for granted. 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. From a young age, Laura Willowes has always loved the country, growing up in a quiet, traditional family in the heart of Somerset where she seems at one with nature and everything it has to offer.

I tried to think of it as wild, but word choices kept tripping me up and it just felt odd and frustrating. The story itself is frustrating, as all womans lives were in the 20s, and the result of that is a great theory where they give their souls to satan. Maybe if this story were written now, she would not have to pass from her father to her brother, to satan, but just to own herself, but that just shows how times change. Warner captures a reality in the way that women and men living the lives they do would process emotions and ideas, through objects and customary expressions, and even further how these people don’t really understand what it is that they’re reacting to or why they say the things they do, except for custom, convention, and the lack of alternative to say anything else that would be acceptable. He tries to be sensitive about other peoples’ opinions and feelings, always remembers occasions, and when you argue with him he makes you feel bad for disagreeing with him because his reasoning is always so moral and he’s clearly put time into formulating whatever opinion he’s going to give you, and he takes it seriously.Though sometimes disturbed by strange noises at night, she settles in and befriends her landlady and a poultry farmer. Finally, he proposes marriage to a London visitor, Pandora Williams, who has treated his wasp stings, and the two retreat to London.

It was in the way Laura shuddered when Caroline’s deepest feeling was revealed to have to do with Christ’s folded grave garments, it was in the way she saw a small, helpless kitten as the sign of her witchhood, in how she felt she had to give up the pretty flowers she bought for herself to Caroline’s living room and how she didn’t scream when her brothers left her tied to the tree as a child, but carried on singing and dreaming until her father found her that evening. 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. The move comes in the wake of the death of Laura's father, Everard, with whom she lived at the family home, Lady Place. When we meet Laura Willowes in the opening pages of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes (pub. Lolly Willowes is about these ‘duties’, these obligations, the little things that are not bad in themselves, but accumulating year after year just crush the life out of the most vibrant of personalities.This is not a sort of compelling, page-turner read but every time I decided to sit down with it, I was completely absorbed and "bewitched. Going along with the family’s decision, Laura tries to make the best of things of London, helping Caroline with her children and other domestic duties. The first gestures towards male mythic gods creating worlds where the Latin fingere, 'to mould, to create, to form' is often the verb used just as it is when Pygmalion creates the most beautiful female statue who he prays to be converted into his ideal, adoring woman - a woman of his own creation. If this was the story of Lolly Willowes, it would still be of note as a showcase for Warner’s remarkable facility with language and sinuous approach to syntax; it's additionally exceptional as an early feminist fable making a persuasive and poignant case for female agency (Warner’s novel predates Woolf’s landmark A Room of One's Own by several years).