2026-05-20 - Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner ===================================================== Witch Meme I found Lolly Willowes on a list of early feminist books and added it to my to-read list. Later i saw articles about it, and bumped it to the top of the list. The article text is below [A] & [B]. Beware, there be spoilers. The book is a satire, and indeed i found it humorous. It made me laugh more than once. My only complaint is that it is so framed in church terminology, but then, so was English society at that time. I enjoyed this book so much, i plan to put it on my to-read-again list, which is, comparatively, a very short list. I also plan to read other books by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Laura Willowes was a somewhat neglected young girl who spent a lot of time alone. She became eccentric and introverted. She liked her own company and disliked balls and other group activities. She liked books, gardening, and herbal lore. Her father owned a professional brewery and she picked up an interest in brewing. Another of her character traits was that she was extremely dutiful, even against her own best interests. One passage refers to `femme sole` and `femme covert` and "all that rot". This led me down an interesting rabbit hole. If i were subject to coverture [3], i might wish to become a witch too. At the age of 47, Laura Willowes abruptly decided to sluff off her dutiful daily routine. I loved the description of her decision-making process, wildly following the most tenuous but legitimate connections. I also enjoyed how she whole-heartedly immersed herself in nature, taking it all in and relishing the experience. I read in one book that some witches spent time naked and alone in nature to absorb spiritual power. Basically an ancient form of "forest bathing." In the first story in Myths of the Modocs [4], the Old Man (God) instructs his son to perform rigorous swimming rituals in remote and high altitude pools for the same purpose, and to avoid human society afterwards to prolong the results. It stands to reason that these swimming rituals would have been done naked and alone. This Modoc myth existed outside of church belief systems, and probably pre-dated them too. To frame it in terms of Satanism would be a grave error, because that would be untrue, or in other words, a lie. * * * [A] Your 2nd book recommendation is Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman, a novel first published in 1926. It was such fun to re-read this after a period of years. It's a so-called feminist classic, a slim little book. The first 2/3rds are quite light, almost boring. I think intentionally. Then, 2/3rds in, there's this very dramatic shift. It's about this woman, Laura Willowes, who is a spinster. After her mother dies, she lives with her father and brother and is gradually boxed in as a kind of unpaid servant to the family. There's no opportunity to escape or have a life of her own. The book is exploring how patriarchal society can diminish women's lives, even ostensibly in supportive and loving ways. Lolly, as she's known, has become very bonded to the natural world and the village she is living in. Then her nephew comes to live with her. Again, this is very much an imposition, she doesn't want him there. Then this kitten turns up and scratches her. Lolly immediately understands that this kitten scratch, which causes her to bleed, is a pact with the devil. She understands that, tacitly, she has known this was going to come, has in some ways desired it. And so she commits to becoming a witch. All of a sudden, she has a new life before her: the life of a witch, although she is fully aware, that she's going to pay the price for that. She's not sure what, but there must be one. It's all told in this wonderfully witty prose. In some ways it's a satire, in other ways, it's a very, very serious book. I think it's actually very trenchant in the way it's describing how domesticity traps so many women, and how few options there are to escape that. From: [1] Lolly Willows book recommendation * * * [B] "That's Why We Become Witches": Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes (1926) When Laura Willowes' father dies, she goes to live in London with her older brother and his family. She is 28, under pressure to find a husband. But Laura shuns the local tea parties and genial balls, for there is never "an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches." And besides, she has the unfortunate habit of making rather odd remarks at dinner parties, such as when she tells Mr. Arbuthnot, apropos of very little: "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." It's this very remark, in fact, that convinces Laura's wards to cease and desist from any attempts to marry her off. And so, Laura becomes "Aunt Lolly", a caretaker for the younger children, accompanying them on seaside holidays, even though she'd rather "go by herself for long walks inland and find strange herbs". She is prone to seasonal fugue, a "recurrent autumnal fever", and daydreams of dark woods. Days become years, years become decades; the spinster bides her time. One day, shopping for chrysanthemums on Moscow Road, Lolly sniffs a bouquet of beech sprays. "They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination." She enquires after their origin. "From near Chenies, ma'am, in Buckinghamshire." That evening, at dinner, she announces a change of course to her extended family, whose mouths gape in bafflement: "Great Mop is a village in the Chilterns, and I am going to live there, and perhaps keep a donkey." In Great Mop, "she lived in perfect idleness and contentment, growing each day more freckled and more rooted in peace", with little company but that of her landlady, a Mrs. Leak. Until, that is, her nephew, Titus--now a churlish aspiring writer, fond of beer and raspberries--comes to mooch off Aunt Lolly, forcing her back into the domestic servitude she had so radically escaped. One evening, in anguish, she stumbles toward "darkening trees that waited there so stilly" and into the woods of which she had dreamed her entire life. And suddenly the heretofore social novel metamorphoses into something much more strange: "She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood." She is not alone in her compact: Mrs. Leak, it turns out, is also a witch--as are many other women in Great Mop. Soon after her pledge to Satan, Lolly attends the Witches' Sabbath, a dark inversion of the balls that she had always eschewed. She meets Emily, a "pasty-faced and anaemic young slattern", and the women interlock their writhing bodies. "They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction." Satan arrives at the sabbath in the guise of a loving huntsman; he looks like "a Chinaman", with "the face of a very young girl". With his serpent's tongue, he licks Lolly's right cheek: "How are you enjoying your first Sabbath, Miss Willowes?" Misfortune begins to continually befall Titus. His milk constantly curdles; a hairdresser butchers his boyish locks; he falls face-first into a wasps' nest in the woods. Finally, he becomes engaged to a woman named Pandora (bodes well) and moves back to London; and finally, Lolly is truly alone with the "satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership" of her one true love: the Devil. The novel ends with a meditation on all the witchy women of Europe, who have opted out of the snares of patriarchy. > When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over > Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, > and as unregarded, I see them, wives and sisters of respectable > men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and > Puritans... Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, > house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for > diversion each other's silly conversation, and listening to men > talking together in the way that men talk and women listen... > Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair... > That's why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending > life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure... > It's to escape all that--to have a life of one's own, not an > existence doled out to you by others. Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) wrote Lolly Willowes, her debut novel, shortly before meeting her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland (née Mary Kathleen Macrory). At first she was self-conscious in the presence of Ackland--young, poised and beautiful, and I was none of these things--but Warner invited her to stay in a spare room at Miss Green, the worker's cottage that Warner had purchased in East Chaldon in 1929. They would live together for 38 years, and catch the attention of MI5 for their communist activities. When Virginia Woolf once asked Warner, at a party in Bloomsbury, how she knew so much about witches, the author of Lolly Willowes replied matter-of-factly: "Because I am one." From: [2] That's Why We Become Witches * * * author: Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 1893-1978 detail: source: tags: ebook,fantasy,fiction,gender,witch title: Lolly Willowes Footnotes ========= [1] Lolly Willowes book recommendation [2] That's Why We Become Witches [3] Coverture (wikipedia) [4] Myths of the Modocs (gutenberg) Tags ==== ebook fantasy fiction gender witch