# 2026-05-20 - Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
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
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Lolly_Willowes
HTML source: ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/7/2/2/2/72223/
tags: ebook,fantasy,fiction,gender
title: Lolly Willowes
# Footnotes
HTML [1] Lolly Willowes book recommendation
HTML [2] That's Why We Become Witches
TEXT [3] Coverture
HTML [4] Myths of the Modocs
# Tags
DIR ebook
DIR fantasy
DIR fiction
DIR gender