Lolly Willowes : Or the Loving Huntsman (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Sylvia Townsend Warner (Author), Alison Lurie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 1999 | Series: New York Review Books (Book 5)

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sylvia Townsend Warner began her literary career as a poet, and her first novel is as nimble and precise as poetry and reads as if it might have been composed to a meter. Like some of Jane Austen's fiction, Lolly Willowes is a comedy about the perils, pleasures, and consolations of spinsterhood, and the predicament of its heroine is at first deliberately and deceptively commonplace. "Aunt Lolly, a middle-aging lady, light-footed upon stairs, and indispensable for Christmas Eve and birthday preparations," is nevertheless troubled by vague, indefinable longings, a hankering after the solitude of woods and dark rural places. At last a revelation in a greengrocer's leads her to abandon her outraged London family and take rooms in an obscure hamlet, Great Mop.

Here her neighbors keep curiously late and noisy hours, but otherwise allow her to pass the time "in perfect idleness and contentment." She is eventually pursued into her idyll, however, by her nephew, and Titus's familiar small demands drive her to rage and despair: "No! You shan't get me. I won't go back. I won't.... Oh! Is there no help?" She is promptly visited by a mysterious black kitten, who fastens its claws upon her hand and draws blood. At once she understands. The kitten is her familiar, and has been sent by dark forces. "She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil."

She has, in short, become a witch--or, rather, she has rediscovered her own slumbering diabolical potential, in the unlikely setting of a Buckinghamshire hamlet that--as she now realizes--is peopled entirely by witches. Laura soon attends a rollicking but ultimately rather disappointing midnight Sabbath; she is visited by Satan in the shape of a pleasant-faced man in a corduroy coat and gaiters who rids her of Titus and restores her to privacy and peace. She is left with a vision of the women "all over England, all over Europe ... as common as blackberries, and as unregarded" to whom he has offered the promise of adventure, "the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in." It is this vision that lends the novel its subversive edge, that ultimately allies it less with the work of Austen than with that of Virginia Woolf, and with later feminists. They "know they are dynamite," says Laura of Satan's women, "and long for the concussion that may justify them." --Sarah Waters

Review

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved. In Lolly Willowes, her first novel, she moves with somber confidence into the realm of the supernatural, and her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it. This is the witty, eerie, tender but firm life history of a middle-class Englishwoman who politely declines to make the expected connection with the opposite sex and becomes a witch instead.
— John Updike

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 Willowes is [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 Willowes would be an ideal book-club selection, sure to spark a rousing discussion.
— Tim Walker, News-Press

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Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (September 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940322161
• ISBN-13: 978-0940322165
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #423,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An astonishing edition of an astonishing novel, March 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Lolly Willowes : Or the Loving Huntsman (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

These new little NYRB editions are just honeys--I have yet to read one that wasn't absolutely spectacular (the editors have superb taste), and the editions themselves are little gems--they FEEL so nice in your hands because they're made of gorgeous high quality paper and set in a lovely font.

Warner's novel is fantastic--its rhythms are slow but musical, and it takes quite a while to determine what awaits Laura in Great Mop. A very, very funny book that also comments movingly on the condition of "odd women" in the generation before Suffrage... I couldn't put this down!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars more like a slow cruise down the river than a high-speed chase, February 1, 2006

By 

Hortensia "Sunshine" (California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Lolly Willowes : Or the Loving Huntsman (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This book might not be for everyone. The pace is very slow and leisurely. There isn't much action, in fact periods of 20 years go by without much action. However, the writing is elegant, flowing and rhythmical, a pleasure to read. There isn't a single sentece in the book that is jarring or out of place. The story is based on the lives of superfluous women after WWI and the Spanish influenza killed off a lot of males that would otherwise have been available for marriage. It is also a nod to the suspicion in which society in general has held unmarried women, and the fact that for a long time there was no place for them in society - they couldn't go out and work and live independent lives and so were often just used by their relatives as unpaid labor in exchange for a place to live and financial support. There really isn't any witchcraft in the book, at least not the Harry Potter kind of witchcraft. Lolly Willowes's pact with the devil is just how her sudden desire for independance would seem to her friends and relatives - the devil got into her.

Overall the book is a pleasure to read, but you have to be willing to slow down and enjoy the scenery.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A kind of realist fantasy about a woman-witch., November 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman (Paperback)

Lolly Willowes is Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel (1926). It is a wry look at the contrictions of an Edwardian spinster's life--and at her unexpected escape from those constrictions. Although it ostensibly tells the tale of a woman who becomes a witch, the supernatural is rather understated in this book. Of much greater interest to Warner is the *possibility* of a lifestyle unbound by conventions. The novel also puts into relief the constrast between urban life in the early 20th century and the life of rural England--a place both influenced by modern life and stubbornly resistant to it. A wonderful read. Intelligent, funny, insightful. and a note or two or interest: his was the VERY FIRST Book of the Month book. It was very well received in both England and the U.S.. AFter the publication of this book, Warner was at a dinner party with Virginia Woolf, who asked her if her knowledge of witches came from being one herself!!