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.