Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of the most interesting literary figures of the 21st century, and Lolly Willowes is one of her finest works, even more stunning if you think it was her debut novel. Self-supporting, intellectually independent, and consistently sceptical of social and religious rules that constrained women, her work exposes the pressure of family pieties, patriarchal authority, and women’s enforced dependence through stories that aren’t slogans and where rebellion is psychologically constructed as the only alternative. On a side note, Warner openly lived in a lesbian partnership and wrote fiction in which same-sex love is a continuum with women’s solidarity, dissent, and desire, and part of an emotional and political stance.
Lolly Willowes, in particular, is an absolutely delightful novella in three parts, first about a young woman who never marries and is eventually cornered into leaving the countryside for a dull life in the city, then we follow her as she turns from Laura into Aunt Lolly, a tame and useful spinster who helps around the house and behaves as expected. Eventually, Laura isn’t that woman, and this turns into an origin story about how society, and the habit of taking women for granted, leaves you just one viable option: to embrace witchcraft and seek liberation in the Devil.
It’s often labelled as satirical, but I don’t think it is. On the contrary, it’s very delicate and plausible and subtle
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