DaviesGill, MalcolmDavid and SimonsJohn (eds.). Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner: English Novelist, 1893–1978 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).

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. JoannouMaroula (ed.). The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Being a person, in this world, is a failure. It is a failure to be always and ever living up to what one should be doing, which, after all, as Lolly achingly feels over and over again- isn’t such a problem when someone just wants you to wind the yarn, or just help mend this one sheet. But eventually the dust settles and Laura (who tries and tries again to emerge from behind Lolly) grows so tired of it that taking to her bed ill for two weeks is a blessed relief- all the understanding of her desire to do nothing (which is the only coded way she can express her real desire for independence) that would not have been there otherwise is hers. It offers even more understanding of the “fashionable” invalid of the era. There are few alternatives for a woman who desires to be independent but living on her own in a town of 200 people called Great Mop. But even then, she is not safe until she makes a deal with the devil. 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. All of this came from my father. His defining characteristic is “duty”. I can’t think of a better way to describe it, and before I read Lolly Willowes, I didn’t have that word either. My dad is one of the best people I know. He always, unerringly, puts other people first. To a fault. 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. As you can imagine, our political discussions did not (and still don’t) end well for me- I always end up sounding like a petulant child somehow and he’s still “father,” patient, kind, waiting for me to figure it out. Like “Aunt Lolly,” my dad strongly believes in his role as “father.” If he was in the middle of a conversation and all of a sudden my brother or I did something or said something that was wrong in any way, he would stop, put on the mask and say, “Now, Kelly, remember to be kind and…” like if he didn’t correct me for making fun of someone’s shoes I was going to turn out to be a bad person who kills kittens and it was going to be his fault somehow. If this makes him sound cold or distant- he wasn’t at all, he just had such a deeply ingrained sense of this duty that meant that what he should be doing always took priority. It was like a compulsion. He couldn’t help it.

BurchardtJeremy. Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). With this opening, Townsend Warner establishes some key concerns: the disposition of single women as if they were furniture, the strong convention that single women needed to live under the care of a male guardian, and the conviction that this convention subsumed the wishes of any individual woman. Townsend Warner’s approach to exploring these themes is extraordinary, and therein lies the power of the novel. She structures Laura’s story to carry her readers along with Laura’s awakening to her own desires and powers. She does so with a deep understanding of the power of social conventions, a wry sense of humor, and the ability to express is beautiful, wild prose the powers of nature and Laura’s relationship to the land on a deep, almost primeval level. I emerged from this novel with a new favorite literary character, and a deep appreciation of Townsend Warner’s considerable skills as a writer and a social critic. The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. UCL Press; ISSN 2398-0605. Open access journal available free online. 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. […] Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a hand. The ruddy young man and his Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia's scarlet cloak trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them discolor with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from a young man's cheeks, and from Britannia's mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her.

The manner in which Lolly becomes a free being is unique and unorthodox. I tried to imagine how it would have been received by her original audience in 1926, to no avail. She seems to be saying that the caging of women by men makes any alternative preferable and no price too costly. 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: 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.” Even more impressive is the way that the prose is woven through with imagery creating a whole subtext of figurative meanings: 'When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding a universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks of a holly leaf', and 'He loved the countryside as if it were a body.' 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. The latter playfully recalls the stereotype of the witchy crone. And it's worth noting the trees and plants mentioned throughout the text: the willow, for example, which has sacred properties in druidic lore but which also reminded me of Viola's 'willow cabin' speech in Twelfth Night declaimed to Olivia and implicitly comparing female erotic desire with male modes of making love.

Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner (6 December 1893 – 1 May 1978) was an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. 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 and hope you can see what I mean, however faintly: "Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. `It is,' answered Laura with almost violent agreement. `If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.'" a b Jane Dowson. Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge, 1996; ISBN 0-415-13095-6 (pp. 149–58). HalberstamJudith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). The novel was well received by critics on its publication. In France it was shortlisted for the Prix Femina and in the USA it was the very first Book Of The Month for the Book Club. [3]