In literature, I will always pass over the path of stagnant entitlement for that of pain; it's far more interesting that way. Then, "groping after something", she makes a bid for personal freedom, an escape to Great Mop, "a secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns", where she finds herself happily becoming a witch in communion with the devil. When she becomes a witch, it is the natural progression of the things that happened in her life and th events that led her to Great Mop. I don’t recommend going into it simply because of the witchy aspect because it is primarily a comedy of manners. 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.

It's not a spoiler to reveal that Lolly is a witch, able to use her new talents, with help from her new master, to send off her needy nephew Titus in hilarious style. She felt as though she had awoken, unchanged, from a twenty-years slumber, to find them almost unrecognizable. Brian Stableford, " Re-Enchantment in the Aftermath of War", in Stableford, Gothic Grotesques: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Now, for sure, Lolly Willowes is a shoo-in for The 100 Most Charming Oddities in English but one of the all time best? Plus it wears its social commentary quite lightly, successfully avoiding the temptation to be too blunt or preachy.If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fire-place?

Sylvia Townsend Warner's whimsical take on postwar womanhood and the quest for meaning, subtitled "The Loving Huntsman", has a sharp edge, a satirical eye and a covert, untamed, eroticism. While I appreciate that stereotypes can be appropriated, owned and re-configured, I'm less sure about that happening here: for me, Lolly/Laura doesn't so much free herself through all that witch imagining as put herself into a different box but in the same ideological system. A spinster moves to a place because she liked a flower that was grown there, her nephew moves there and she all of a sudden hates him for no reason, she sees a man who is the devil, she wakes up a witch and nothing happens because of it.Suddenly Part 2 sets off in an unforeseen direction as Laura announces she will be moving to the isolated rural village that is the subject of her new book. 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. 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. The titular character, Lolly Willowes- or Laura, is a middle-aged spinster who after her father’s death lived with relatives. Scritto con eleganza e attraversato da una irresistibile vena di humor inglese, si perde un po’ nella parte centrale, per poi riprendersi nel crescendo delle geniali pagine successive.

Nevertheless, Laura is determined to go in spite of the moral and financial pressures Henry tries to bring into play. That desire for more independence eventually comes into its own, and from that moment this novel becomes an early anthem to feminism.

So yes a feminist novel and while the final third is quite strange and didn’t quite work for me (I didn’t see why being a witch meant Satanism), it was a satisfying read. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – review" by Lucy Scholes, The Guardian, Sunday 18 March 2012. Today, Townsend Warner holds her place in this series as a proto-feminist who is also a major minor classic. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1934, photographed by Howard Coster. For more about the literary career of this remarkable woman, the essential texts are Claire Harman's biography, Sylvia Townsend Warner (London, 1989) and I'll Stand By You: Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Acland, edited by Susanna Pinney (London, 1998). 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.

When her father dies, Laura is made to move out of her family home in the country and in with her brother and his family in London. There is a darkness in Lolly Willowes that is almost a mirror image of a holy lady, with everything backward and reversed.