Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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This is a book about witches. But when I finally put this book down last night, I mostly just thought about my father. DoanLaura, and GarrityJane (eds.). Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Woman and the National Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). JamesDavid. ‘Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century’. In Regional Modernisms, edited by AlexanderNeal and MoranJames (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). CastleTerry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). The novel was well received by critics on its publication. In France it was shortlisted for the Prix Femina and in the USA it was the very first Book Of The Month for the Book Club. [3]

DaviesGill, MalcolmDavid and SimonsJohn (eds.). Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner: English Novelist, 1893–1978 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). Honestly, I had no idea what I was about to read other than I knew that something very, very odd, strange and uncanny was going to happen. That’s it. So at the start of this slim little novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of the prose and the way in which we are right from the start being told that this character was to be a victim of sorts of her class and time. When we meet Laura “Lolly” Willowes, her father has just passed away and Laura is automatically to be sent to live in the household of one of her brothers in London. You see, Laura is a 28 year old unmarried woman who loved her father and knew nothing but a life in his house that enabled her to do as she pleased. However, that carefree life in the country becomes a more restrictive one when she moves to London. 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?"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. NesbittJennifer Poulos. ‘Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth-Century Literature 49 (2003), pp. 449–471. Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you: Let her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret, if she had one. […] Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a hand. Merleau-PontyMaurice. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by SmithColin (London: Routledge, 1962).

HeideggerMartin. Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by HofstadterAlbert (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1971). Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 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. KnollBruce. ‘“An Existence Doled Out”: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 344–363.