Customer Reviews

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

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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!

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.

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!!

I also cannot believe that just because the heroine (spoiler warning..) abandons her relatives, runs off to the forest, dances with the devil, adopts a black cat, and becomes a witch they put this in horror. That's an outrage. This is one of the classic pieces of women's literature of all time and when I went to college it was required reading at the UW (Washington, not Wisconsen). The book, besides having obvious overtones of individuality and escape from oppression/societal norms, deals with a wider array of controversial (still, but especially then) topics than can be easily summarized. (For instance, book could be read as very existentialist because it's never quite certain that she didn't dream it all) Suffice it to say that the book is an extraordinary read. Also, it is a small book, sparsely written, episodic, plot-driven, but with just enough sparkling detail to keep the reader transfixed. And it is funny. My favorite part is when she meets the satan-cat and realizes the cat is the devil but she is, though mildly alarmed at first, too impressed by his "Satanic playfullness" to worry.

Lolly Willowes escapes a confining life as the dependent relation, the spinster, of an earlier era. However, her need to shuck a rigid identity, whether externally or self-imposed, is one we can all still understand. Her new home in an obscure English village is as much a surprise to her as to the reader. A not entirely welcome cat moves in with her, and she finds that the Devil can be rather an attractive neighbor. I wish this book would be reprinted.

What's this doing in the Horror section! It's a beautifully written story of a woman who rebels and finds her own unique sort of contentment after a lifetime of meeting other people's wishes and expectations. Profoundly subversive and very memorable.

Lolly Willowes is the spirited story of a woman searching for herself. The themes in this book are as applicable now as they were when it was written. Thank you to Academy Chicago for bringing us this beautiful edition with an insightful introduction (they also use the original cover art).

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

Lolly Willowes is the subject of this novel. The story starts out at the end of the nineteenth century with Lolly's birth to a well-to-do traditional English family. She has two older brothers and is the adored youngest child. After the death of her parents she goes to live with her older brother and his wife and two daughters. Although her birth name is Laura, her nieces and nephews call her Lolly and the name stays with her.

She is considered a spinster at 28, and she's considered odd because she does not seem all that interested in marrying or having a family. Instead, Lolly is interested in herbs and potions and all things found in nature. But these interests are put on hold as she takes on familial duties required of her. In some ways she almost becomes invisible to the family and society, as they only see her as someone fulfilling a role given to them.

She continues to live with her brother and his family until the children are grown. I don't want to give any more of the plot away, because it's best if you don't know what happens after this.

The book is divided into three main sections, each in some ways each a representation of a different stage in Lolly's development.

This novel was written in the 1920s and is just a fabulous exploration of what life was like for young, single women in this era. (Remembering that so many men died during the Great War.)

This is an odd little book - full of satire with a bit of magical realism thrown in. It's a quick read, you can finish it in one sitting easily. But it does pack a big punch and the author's message comes in loud and clear by the end. This book was particularly touching to me because it caught such a central part of being a woman - you go through different stages in life. You are daughter, and then perhaps a mother or aunt. But after that you shouldn't be defined by your previous roles - it's the time when you best figure out what your passions are, and how to best live out the remaining years of your life. I think many women (and men) reading this book will identify with Lolly in her search and desire to lead a fulfilled life.

Recommended.

To put it briefly, Lolly Willowes is about Laura (insistently called Lolly by her family, a name that began with a child's inability to pronounce her correct name and then stuck, becoming symbolic of her status as a spinster hanger-on in the family), an Englishwoman who doesn't care to marry and lives with her father on his country estate until his death when she is 28. She then resides with a brother and sister-in-law in London until she reaches middle age, at which point she suddenly rebels, moves to a small country village by herself, becomes a witch, and sells her soul to the devil in exchange for peace, solitude, and a nonsocial existence, unencumbered by family or civilization. Same old same old, right?

The novel became a surprise bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic when it was published in 1926 (it was the inaugural selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club), in part because so many women--"women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded" (211)--could relate to the character's situation and savor her fantastic refusal of demure, helpful, but largely invisible spinsterhood (a refusal, without doubt, that was--and still is--considerably harder to pull off in reality). In fact, another highly entertaining novel about a woman similarly resisting repressive social norms (though not by selling her soul), Rose Macaulay's Crewe Train, appeared the same year.

On the surface, then, the novel is a hugely entertaining fantasy--the kind of book that might make you laugh out loud not so much with hilarity as with simple pleasure. But I've realized, having read it a few times now, that, like all great novels, it's open to multiple interpretations. Is Laura "really" chatting with Satan and becoming a witch? Or, as with Henry James's famous unreliable narrator in "Thr Turn of the Screw," is she having increasingly vivid fantasies or hallucinations of escaping from her limited existence in a patriarchal culture? Warner provides some clues suggesting this reading. For example, in a scene in a grocery shop just before her departure for the country, Laura has a vision of a woman raising the fruits and vegetables:

"She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. ... No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.

"She started as the man of the shop came up to her and asked her what she wished for. Her eyes blinked, she looked with surprise at the gloves upon her hands." (80)

In this reading, the novel might even--as unlikely as it would seem from the cheerfulness of its surface story--have something in common with the all-time classic of the madness brought on by women's claustrophobic domestic lives, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's early feminist story "The Yellow Wallpaper".

However you read it, though, this is a novel to savor. The prose is gorgeous and endlessly entertaining, the world it presents is magical and liberatory, and Warner constantly and eloquently subverts the assumptions of a male-dominated society throughout. And by the way, the New York Review Books Classics edition is, like all their other titles, beautifully published--you could keep yourself busy for many a month with the great books they're publishing!

[If you enjoyed this review, please check out my blog at www.minormoderns.blogspot.com, which is devoted to exploring lesser-known writers and texts from the first half of the 20th century.]

This novel is many things; some people say it might be a feminist novel and the author a literary maverick, or this novel is unusual because the main character finally realizes her true vocation as a witch, but _Lolly Willowes_ is so much more beautiful and complex than all that. For one thing, no review that I'd read said anything about this story being about one woman's love of the English countryside. The beauty of the land is on every page. The main character, Laura Willowes, "Aunt Lolly," gets so much pleasure from walking the hills and meadows and woods and woodland paths that I feel sure that author Sylvia Townsend Warner put herself into Lolly. If being passionate about solitary walks in nature is a sign of witchcraft, then let's have more of it.

The novel flows beautifully, and has many lines like this: "The bees droned in the motionless lime trees" (38). Sensitive images like that do many things: they show the passion for the countryside (as I mentioned), and also give the reader a sense of time, and place, and mood, and Lolly's interior thoughts. These carefully-crafted sentences are not random poetic lines dropped into the text but part and parcel of this novel's pace and tone of voice. In a pivotal scene, Lolly is in a shop room when she goes into a sort of meditative trance; the room falls quiet like she's alone outdoors: "No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a riper plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows" (80).

The novel is 220 pages and divided into three parts of almost equal length, each part mapping out Lolly Willowes's life through her psychological development. Part 1 shows what the wild hill country meant to Lolly, as she goes from birth through childhood in the care of her loving father, whose nurturing of her is truly a touching portrait of fatherhood. This opening section also shows the social environment in which Lolly is embedded; we see the development of her two brothers and their wives and children, how they are well-off--but perhaps not typically middle-class--and how the "spinster aunt" Lolly plays a useful social role. The Willowes stalwart Englishness is characterized by steadfast values, often predictable, but what society depends upon. Though Lolly seems stuck in one position (the maiden Aunt), it is a comfortable prison. This early portrait of Laura Willowes is necessary to show her later development and how her streak of creativity finds expression when she breaks away from her brother and the Willowes's stable and secure existence.

Also of note is that this novel was originally published in 1926 and now has a kind of sociological or non-fiction quality. I'm not spoiling the novel for you if I suggest that the turning point is in Part 1 around the topic of how the Willowes family holds up during World War I, or the Great War, during which they have been confined to London: During the immediate aftermath of the war, Lolly becomes aware that she is hungry for change in life: "She [Lolly] saw how admirable it was for Henry and Caroline [ her brother and his wife ] to have stayed where they were [in London]." The narrator continues, "But she was conscious, more conscious than they were, that the younger members of the family had somehow moved into new positions. And she herself, had she not slightly strained against her moorings, fast and far sunk as they were?" (66). Again, the key to Lolly/Laura's happiness is the countryside--but in an unusual expression of creative energy and self-consciousness, which you'll find out when you read.

There is an understated sensuality at work all through this novel, one that male readers can appreciate, too, since Warner knew that there were men like Lolly Willowes, who wanted to break away from their masculine social roles in the 1920s.