Book Review: Lolly Willowes

Lolly Willowes (1926), by Sylvia Townsend Warner, is a must read for the fan of Elisabeth Gaskell, anyone who knows who Djuna Barnes is, and Agatha Christie fans who have read everything she’s written multiple times, want more, and are sick of murder but up for 1920s witches. And 1920s philosophy and politics.

It is for readers who want a more overtly feminist and less cheerful version of the Map and Lucia books by E. F. Benson.

It is also for Theodore Dreiser fans who want something less discouraging and meaningfully shorter. You don’t need to have actually read Dreiser’s American Tragedy (1925) to know it is not going to turn out well, though if you’re interested in the death penalty, it’s worth a read. The stakes in Lolly Willowes may seem significantly lower: No one is about to be executed by the state here.

Yet it is clear that Sylvia Townsend Warner recognizes the stakes as quite high. Lolly Willowes depicts the slow suffocating power of class and gender expectations. Upon her father’s death, Lolly is sucked into her brother’s family’s life in London:

• “‘Of course,’ said [sister-in-law] Caroline, ‘you will come to us’.” (1)

• “She would take the air in Hyde Park and watch the children on their ponies and the fashionable trim ladies in Rotten Row, and go to the theatre in a cab.” (4)

The dehumanizing way in which these expectations become internalized is gently chilling:

• “Every one spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had almost forgotten her baptismal name.” (58)

• "[W]hen Laura went to London she left Laura behind, and entered into a state of Aunt Lolly. She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset … shorn of her long meandering country days, sleeping in a smart brass bedstead instead of her old and rather pompous four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and performing unaccustomed duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different person. Or rather, she had become two persons, each different."(61)

Though gentle, Lolly Willowes is clearly a far from subtle exploration of interpellation. The level of detail about her smart vs pompous bed is one of the delights of the book. The fact that rather than fully becoming “another person” she manages to “become two persons” indicates that Lolly Willowes, against the odds, may succeed in extricating and being (again) herself. Her affinity for wandering the hedgerows and gathering herbs as a young woman leads, eventually, to participation in a rural Witches’ Sabbath.

She meets the Devil. More, she contracts with the Devil and in so doing (re)names her self:

• “She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil.” (169)

Rows of white candles burn and melt in front of a dark background.

In between her youthful endeavors and her eventual compact with the Devil, mainstream life, as represented by London and by her roles as an unmarried woman in an established family, attempts not just to control her daily life but to lead her, occasionally through argument but largely through repetition of daily and yearly rituals, into not just becoming but accepting what it expects her to be.

Lolly Willowes is a deeply political, weirdly and subtly—even equivocally— witchy novel in which, most of the time, almost nothing seems to happen. The plot is a woman’s frustrated and often unconscious fight against internalizing the expectations her social context has of her. Lolly Willowes tries to be fundamentally optimistic about the potential of individual identity and resistance, and Warner’s perspective is delightfully presented with scene setting and a world of side characters. The description of the behavior of hedghogs, and that of a hedgehog-centric rural neighbor is, for a certain kind of reader, simply not to be missed:

• “Kind Miss Carloe, she would sit up till all hours tempting her hedgehog with bread-and-milk. Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals ; they go out for walks at night, grunting, and shoving out their black snouts.” (136)

One question here is whether this individual woman, Laura Erminia Willowes, Aunt Lolly, will be able to avoid her fate as “Aunt Lolly.” Miss Willowes’ (“Laura” doesn’t seem quite right) has triumphs. At the same time, the equivocal presentation of the novel’s own witchy escape route and the characterization style together suggest a more ambivalent or at least less straightforward view.

Netflix’s Persuasion makes me want to re-read Mansfield Park

In recent days, I’ve had a few friends ask whether I’m planning to watch the Netflix Persuasion. Like many of us who have read all of Jane Austen’s novels multiple times,* Persuasion is my favorite. Or at least sometimes it is my favorite. But somehow all of this talk about the latest apparently mediocre Persuasion adaptation is just making me want to re-read Mansfield Park.

Thinking about Persuasion naturally led me to reflect on Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, the other two Austen novels that seem to emerge into popular culture less frequently and favorably than the big three: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey is, for me, in a Jane Austen category of its own, but Persuasion and Mansfield Park have a thematic relationship in my personal classification system: their respective heroines Anne Elliot and Fanny Price have a lot in common.

If Pride and Prejudice is prosecco, Persuasion is a drinking chocolate: slow, warming, and dense with meaning. It is also satisfying enough to make the reading worthwhile. What then of Mansfield Park, Austen’s least sparkling novel?

It’s not even a beverage, but thick edgy sweet biting molasses. When I think Mansfield Park, I can smell suffering, and it’s an inescapable cloyingly sweet burnt and bitter miasma emanating from a morally rotten core. (Sorry, molasses.) The slave trade serves as a foundation of the wealth in the novel. As Marsha Huff’s “Sir Thomas Bertram and the Slave Trade” notes, “The first readers of the novel, published in 1814, would have assumed that Sir Thomas Bertram’s business in Antigua was a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people, as were all West Indian enterprises.” Though somewhat obscured by charades and shrubberies, and by the vivacious Mary Crawford, it’s hard not to read the novel with oppression on the mind given the deep background slavery and the overtly troubling treatment of the novel’s heroine.

No wonder it is what the Jane Austen Society of North America characterizes as Austen’s “‘problem’ novel.”

Since Austen is both one of the most well-known nineteenth century “women’s fiction” authors and her novels are frequently retold in various adaptations, her heroines are some of the most widely recognized nineteenth century women. I have the sense that Fanny Price is the easiest to forget.

If Persuasion’s Anne is slow to realize her own mind, slow to claim agency, Fanny’s reluctance and inability to do so is greater. When I read that the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is understood to be off track because of the way Anne “has been given a spunky and outspoken persona absent from her character in the book” as CBR puts it, I can’t help but wonder what a Netflix adaptation in the same vein would do with Fanny. Her need for an entirely new, out-of-character re-write is far more desperate than Anne’s. If you haven’t yet read Mansfield Park or need a reminder, think of Fanny as a pathetic, more put-upon version of Pride and Prejudice's Charlotte Lucas, for whom things are bad enough that she is condemned by her place in life to willingly marry herself to perhaps the least appealing bachelor in a novel that includes the predatory villain George Wickham. At least Charlotte knows something of what she is trading for security.

Fanny is widely understood as too weak to be interesting due to such characterizations as this: “She had been quite overlooked by her cousins; and as her own opinion of her claims on Sir Thomas’s affection was much too humble to give her any idea of classing herself with his children, she was glad to remain behind and gain a little breathing-time” (Chapter XIX). She is not assertive, she does not recognize her own worth, and she does not expect attention. She is, as she puts it, “graver than other people” (Chapter XXI).

Of course she is. Nothing about Fanny’s circumstances builds her agency and everything about it conspires to make her “grave.”

Edmund, the brother with whom Fanny is in love without hope, has a suggestion about how she should ingratiate herself to her uncle. Her part in the conversation shows her to be analyzing everyone’s probable responses, hyperaware of the potential for criticism of herself: “‘Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.’ “But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did you not hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?’” The conversation continues and she defends herself by explaining why she did not pursue the conversation: “And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I though it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel” (Chapter XXI). Fanny’s attempt at self-defense is all the more painful because she has no appreciation of the unfairness of her situation. She understands herself to be trapped in this situation, with no way to win, but she does not recognize that she has been trapped by others whose control she cannot escape. In the context of the novel, her concerns make perfect sense. Her upbringing since age ten has been with a family determined that she should know her place and eager to scapegoat her.

Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may not be a sparkling character, but she is a survivor. Her response to this impossible situation is intriguing. Lavish appreciation on characters like the witty, energetic, Elizabeth Bennet with her well developed sense of agency, but save some love for Fanny. She deserves it.

• Note: Though I’ve read all of Austen’s novels multiple times, I haven’t read them recently enough to be confident of accuracy with regard to the details. Specific comparison is not what this is about. What I’m exploring here is my memory of the books, my memory of the adaptations I’ve seen, of a range of criticism I’ve read, and my sense of the cultural role of the books, including the way they serve as indexes of societal priorities.

Why I don’t write book reviews for nonfiction

I’ve been reading a lot in recent months, but I have not even been thinking about writing book reviews. Usually, when I read novels and short stories, I have a review developing in my head. I may be wrong about this, but I think of it as being a bit like a background program running on a computer.

Unusually for me, I have not been reading all that much fiction. The exception is beautiful children’s books, like Where Ocean Meets Sky by Eric Fan and Terry Fan. But that’s a post for another day. I’ve read non-fiction books from memoir to philosophy to texts for professionals in fields that are not mine. I’m gaining a lot of information. I’m synthesizing ideas and stories, studies and research.

Some of these books are better than others, but they are not exactly comparable. Taking into account their goals, I could develop evaluative criteria, or I could write about my reading experiences. I have read many book reviews of nonfiction, and they’re often quite helpful in directing my reading. I could write reviews myself. But the thought never occurs to me as I read, and when I consider the idea consciously, it holds no appeal.

What I can do, and find myself doing in a range of contexts, is recommend specific books or articles to individuals based on their questions or experiences. I can also pull key examples and pieces of information from this kind of reading and incorporate them as relevant into casual conversations. That’s very different than a book review, because what I have to say is evoked by the context. For me, reading nonfiction simply does not create a void waiting to be filled with a book review.

I titled this post “Why I don’t write book reviews for nonfiction,” but it might be more accurate to title it" “Why I read fiction part 1.” The nature of my engagement is inherently more active when I read fiction.

As much as I am curious and liable to become fascinated by all sorts of ideas and topics, the automatic book review program is not triggered except by fiction.