This is the point in the book where Mitchell would bring out the zap guns. But Warner chooses allegory instead. Lolly finds a baby kitten; or the kitten finds her. Every kitten needs a name. "What shall you call it?" The book started off well-enough. It tells the story of Laura Willowes (“Lolly”), a very independent aging spinster (I dislike that word but that’s the word they use in the book) who lives in England with her brother and his family. Because she’s single, her family try to control her but it’s obvious that Lolly is very headstrong. EnglishElizabeth. Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner (6 December 1893 – 1 May 1978) was an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. ButtsMary. ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1925). In ‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998). It's not a spoiler to reveal that Lolly is a witch, able to use her new talents, with help from her new master, to send off her needy nephew Titus in hilarious style.In Part II, Lolly breaks with her family to move to the village of Great Mop, in the Chilterns. I'm not familiar enough with on-the-ground English geography to have a good grasp of where this is (I had to go to Wikipedia and look it up) but Warner manages to bring it alive with her descriptions of Lolly's wanderings around the district as she explores her new home. As in Part I, Warner carefully lays the groundwork for Lolly's encounter with the Prince of Darkness with hints that things aren't quite what they seem in Great Mop. For example, why does everyone seem to stay up so late at night? After her father’s death, Laura’s caretaker role is shifted from dutiful daughter to irreplaceable aunt. Townsend Warner depicts her as much loved, but greatly constrained in her life in London. Once it becomes clear to Caroline and Henry that Laura will never marry, Caroline resigns herself to sitting with Laura by her side for the rest of her life:

Kahan, Benjamin A. Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Love it as he might, with all the deep Willowes love for country sights and smells, love he never so intimately and soberly, his love must be a horror to her. It was different in kind from hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well, and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it were a body. The middle-class spinster from a respectable family has made a pact with the devil. Laura feels at peace.He left his pipe and tobacco pouch on the mantelpiece. They lay there like the orb and scepter of an usurping monarch. The book] I’ll be pressing into people’s hands forever is “Lolly Willowes,” the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness.”– Helen Macdonald in The New York Times Book Review‘s “By the Book.”

JonesClara. ‘Virginia Woolf and “The Villa Jones” (1931)’. Woolf Studies Annual 22 (2016), pp. 75–95. BurchardtJeremy. Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). putting her hand to her face to wipe off the sweat, she discovered that she smelled of this ambiguous territory […] She plunged her hands into a bush and snuffed into the palms. It was so exciting to discover herself thus perfumed […] that she suddenly found her teeth biting into her flesh, and that was a pleasure too […] Part II ends when Lolly's enjoyment of her new freedom is threatened by her nephew Titus' announced plans to move to Great Mop because he's entranced by its bucolic ways. Titus is the son of Lolly's deceased second brother John. She likes him well enough, and would welcome visits, but his intention to follow her into the "wilderness" leaves her feeling as confined, stifled and miserable as she was in London with Henry and clan: "Laura hated him for daring to love it so. She hated him for daring to love it at all. Most of all she hated him for imposing his kind of love on her. Since he had come to Great Mop she had not been allowed to love in her own way. Commenting, pointing out, appreciating, Titus tweaked her senses one after another as if they were so many bell-ropes.... Day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself further from her.... Presently she would not know it any more. For her too Great Mop would be a place like any other place, a pastoral landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew." Sylvia Townsend Warner's whimsical take on postwar womanhood and the quest for meaning, subtitled "The Loving Huntsman", has a sharp edge, a satirical eye and a covert, untamed, eroticism. Townsend Warner was an unconventional lesbian. For her, inter-war women's potential was what mattered most. Women, says Lolly to the devil, "know they are dynamite" and simply long for "the concussion that may justify them".AlexanderNeal, and JamesMoran (eds.). Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Laura sold her soul in 1922. It seemed a strangely old-fashioned thing to do in the age of riotous nihilism and centers that would not hold and the looming shadows of Great Wars leaning in on either side. And yet it was also the most modern solution Laura’s author, a woman living a very modern life, could fashion.

MillerSimon. ‘Urban Dreams in Rural Reality: Land and Landscape in English Culture, 1920–45’, Rural History 6, no. 1 (1995), pp. 89–102. I can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it was more of a shoulda coulda woulda. Similarly, in her 2012 review of the novel, Lucy Scholes takes note of the feminist focus of the novel, as well as the fact that it predates the better known A Room of One's Own: "With its clear feminist agenda, Lolly Willowes holds its own among Townsend Warner's historical fiction, but it's also an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era." [5] Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). ‘“Penn Country” Branch, Rules, Aims, Objects and Membership, With an Introduction by Ralph M. Robinson’, Pamphlet No. 1, February 1931. So when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks (with a crushed red geranium) and had bent over the greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank showed only a dark, shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in the old holy painting that hung in the dining room and was called the Leonardo.The story is about Laura "Lolly" Willowes, the youngest daughter (b. 1874) of Everard Willowes, who spends the first half of her life living in the shadow of others before breaking free from her family to undergo an extraordinary transformation and "finding herself" when she moves to Great Mop and makes a pact with Satan (or does she?). I am deathly allergic to witty foreplay of the never ending sort. In more detailed terms, this is a category comprised of works written in the very worst vein of Austen, all fluffy gilt and jocular surface with none of said author's craft or deep meditation on human pathos. Now, Lolly Willowes did have some variation to its name, but when one begins with family lineage and ends with bantering dialogue and leaves little to gnaw upon between the two, it all comes off as very English. Much like works by white males, there's a lot of English type stuff glutting the literature realms, so if one wants to be good, one must be very, very, very good. You see, it's a matter of dilution, and not much can be done if a work runs headlong into losing itself in the crowd.