Lolly Willowes Read online

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (available from New York Review Books), her second, followed a year later. Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T. H. White.

  ALISON LURIE is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever. She is a former professor of English at Cornell and has published nine novels, of which the most recent is Truth and Consequences.

  LOLLY WILLOWES

  or

  THE LOVING HUNTSMAN

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Introduction by

  ALISON LURIE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  LOLLY WILLOWES

  Dedication

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  IN 1926 LOLLY WILLOWES was a surprise international best seller. And no wonder: beneath its disguise as a charming British fantasy about witchcraft, the novel was revolutionary. It was, in fact, a subtle demand for women’s right to privacy and independence from their families, for power over their own lives—even if they had to make a pact with Satan to get it.

  Above all, Lolly Willowes spoke to single women of all ages. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a surplus of such women, especially in Britain, where so many young men went out to the colonies of the then far-flung British Empire as soldiers and administrators. A few determined and well-to-do young women followed them, earning the name “the fishing fleet,” and found husbands. Competition among the many more women who stayed home was intense, and if you were plain, shy, or poor you were likely to lose out. The terrible male mortality of World War I (far worse proportionately than that of World War II) made your chances even worse.

  As a result, in almost every family there were unmarried sisters and cousins and aunts. And even in the 1920s it was still taken for granted that a single woman who had no profession was at the disposal of her family. Even if, like Laura Willowes, she had a private income, she was expected to live with her relatives and make herself useful.

  When she began to write Lolly Willowes in 1923, Sylvia Townsend Warner was twenty-nine years old and had more or less given up the idea of ever being married. She had a small flat in London, not far from Kensington Garden, and an ill-paid editorial job; she had also begun to write and publish poetry. But though Sylvia had left home, her mother still required frequent visits, and many former students of her father (who had been a master at the famous English boarding-school Harrow) had fallen into the habit of using her flat as a free hotel.

  Laura Willowes, born nearly twenty years before Sylvia, is far more confined. Until she is twenty-eight she keeps house for her father. When he dies, no one asks her what she wants to do next. Instead, she is automatically transferred, along with a few items of furniture, to the household of her elder brother Henry in London, where she becomes “Aunt Lolly” to her nieces and nephew. It is assumed that she will be glad to move into “the small spare-room” and become an unpaid companion and baby-sitter.

  For the next twenty years all of Laura’s waking hours are occupied by “shopping, letter-writing, arranging the flowers, cleaning the canary-cage,” and caring for children. Even on holidays in the country she has no free time:

  She would have liked to go by herself for long walks inland, . . . but she was too useful to be allowed to stray.

  Her relatives take her servitude for granted. After all, as her sister-in-law muses,

  . . . she was too old now to begin living by herself. It was not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for herself.

  It is not until she is in her mid-forties that Laura begins to long in an inarticulate way for change. Suddenly, one evening in a flower shop, she has a vision of the countryside in autumn.

  She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit. . . . The air about her was cool and moist.

  Impulsively, she decides that she will leave London and go to live in the depths of Buckinghamshire.

  Laura’s brother and sister-in-law, of course, try to stop her, applying both moral and financial pressure. Henry, after announcing that he is “grieved and astonished,” declares, “I cannot allow this. You are my sister. I consider you my charge. I must ask you, once for all to drop this idea. It is not sensible. Or suitable.” Besides, Henry admits under pressure, he has lost half of Laura’s inheritance through bad investments, and therefore it is “out of the question” for her to think of leaving.

  Laura, however, stands her ground. She moves to Great Mop, rents rooms in a cottage, and begins to explore the countryside. One day in spring, in a meadow full of flowers, she realizes what has happened to her:

  The weight of all her unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her bosom down to the earth; she trembled, understanding for the first time how miserable she had been; and in another moment she was released.

  Laura’s happiness is complete until her nephew Titus comes to stay, reasserting his family claim over her time and attention. Immediately, she falls back into a depression:

  She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again. . . . And she was the same old Aunt Lolly, so useful and obliging and negligible. . . . They were come out to recapture her, they had tracked her down and closed her in. . . . They were all leagued against her. They were come out to seize on her soul.

  Fleeing from Titus’s intrusive company, Laura takes refuge in an out-of-the-way deserted field. There, in desperation, she calls out for help, and knows that she has been heard. When she gets home a half-starved kitten has somehow got into her rooms. Almost immediately, it reveals itself as her familiar: Laura has become a witch. It is a fate she accepts without difficulty.

  She was a witch by vocation. . . . What else had set her upon her long solitary walks, her quests for powerful and forgotten herbs, her brews and distillations?

  It is not long before Laura’s landlady, Mrs. Leak, invites her to the local witches’ Sabbath. There, Laura discovers that almost everyone in the village, both male and female, is a witch or warlock. All night they feast and drink and dance, choosing partners without regard for age, class, or sex. At one point Laura finds herself dancing with a red-headed village girl named Emily:

  They whirled faster and faster, fused together. . . . A strand of the red hair came undone and brushed across Laura’s face. The contact made her tingle from head to foot. She shut her eyes and dived into obliviousness. . . .

  Soon Laura’s magic powers begin to work without her conscious effort. Titus is driven off by mysterious forces (a swarm of wasps and a young woman are the main agents of his departure), and she is alone and at peace again. One afternoon, on a deserted local hillside, she has a satisfying encounter with Satan, who has taken the form of a gardener. To him she reveals her (and presumably Sylvia Townsend Warner’s) views on the current condition of women.

  When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common
as blackberries, and as unregarded. . . . There they are, child-rearing, house-keeping. . . . And all the time being thrust down into dullness. . . . I tell you, that sort of thing settles down on one, like a fine dust, and by and by the dust is age, settling down. . . . If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn’t matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed.

  The implication, of course, is that a woman who refuses the “Aunt Lolly” role is, in the view of conventional society, a kind of witch, even if she does no evil. After thinking it over, Laura renounces magic, both white and black:

  One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either. . . . It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others. . . .

  Three years later, Virginia Woolf was to make much the same point, saying that if a woman is to be more than a convenient household appliance, if she is to have a life of her own, and especially if she wants to be a writer, she must have freedom and privacy and “a room of one’s own.” She spoke, we know now, for thousands of women then and in years to come. But Sylvia Townsend Warner had spoken for them first.

  —ALISON LURIE

  LOLLY WILLOWES

  To Bea Isabel Howe

  PART 1

  WHEN HER FATHER died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her elder brother and his family.

  “Of course,” said Caroline, “you will come to us.”

  “But it will upset all your plans. It will give you so much trouble. Are you sure you really want me?”

  “Oh dear, yes.”

  Caroline spoke affectionately, but her thoughts were elsewhere. They had already journeyed back to London to buy an eiderdown for the bed in the small spare-room. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fire-place? Perhaps a bureau would be better, because of the extra drawers? Yes, that was it. Lolly could bring the little walnut bureau with the false handles on one side and the top that jumped up when you touched the spring by the ink-well. It had belonged to Lolly’s mother, and Lolly had always used it, so Sibyl could not raise any objections. Sibyl had no claim to it whatever, really. She had only been married to James for two years, and if the bureau had marked the morning-room wall-paper, she could easily put something else in its place. A stand with ferns and potted plants would look very nice.

  Lolly was a gentle creature, and the little girls loved her; she would soon fit into her new home. The small spare-room would be rather a loss. They could not give up the large spare-room to Lolly, and the small spare-room was the handiest of the two for ordinary visitors. It seemed extravagant to wash a pair of the large linen sheets for a single guest who came but for a couple of nights. Still, there it was, and Henry was right—Lolly ought to come to them. London would be a pleasant change for her. She would meet nice people, and in London she would have a better chance of marrying. Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to make haste if she were going to find a husband before she was thirty. Poor Lolly! black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if one bought it in a country town.

  While these thoughts passed through Caroline’s mind, Laura was not thinking at all. She had picked a red geranium flower, and was staining her left wrist with the juice of its crushed petals. So, when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks, 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 girls will be delighted,” said Caroline. Laura roused herself. It was all settled, then, and she was going to live in London with Henry, and Caroline his wife, and Fancy and Marion his daughters. She would become an inmate of the tall house in Apsley Terrace where hitherto she had only been a country sister-in-law on a visit. She would recognize a special something in the physiognomy of that house-front which would enable her to stop certainly before it without glancing at the number or the door-knocker. Within it, she would know unhesitatingly which of the polished brown doors was which, and become quite indifferent to the position of the cistern, which had baffled her so one night when she lay awake trying to assemble the house inside the box of its outer walls. 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.

  London life was very full and exciting. There were the shops, processions of the Royal Family and of the unemployed, the gold tunnel at Whiteley’s, and the brilliance of the streets by night. She thought of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed streets and squares—but they would be familiar then—complying with the sealed orders of the future; and presently she would be taking them for granted, as the Londoners do. But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray. She must leave all this behind, or only enjoy it as a visitor, unless James and Sibyl happened to feel, as Henry and Caroline did, that of course she must live with them.

  Sibyl said: “Dearest Lolly! So Henry and Caroline are to have you. . . . We shall miss you more than I can say, but of course you will prefer London. Dear old London with its picturesque fogs and its interesting people, and all. I quite envy you. But you mustn’t quite forsake Lady Place. You must come and pay us long visits, so that Tito doesn’t forget his aunt.”

  “Will you miss me, Tito?” said Laura, and stooped down to lay her face against his prickly bib and his smooth, warm head. Tito fastened his hands round her finger.

  “I’m sure he’ll miss your ring, Lolly,” said Sibyl. “You’ll have to cut the rest of your teeth on the poor old coral when Auntie Lolly goes, won’t you, my angel?”

  “I’ll give him the ring if you think he’ll really miss it, Sibyl.”

  Sibyl’s eyes glowed; but she said:

  “Oh no, Lolly, I couldn’t think of taking it. Why, it’s a family ring.”

  When Fancy Willowes had grown up, and married, and lost her husband in the war, and driven a lorry for the Government, and married again from patriotic motives, she said to Owen Wolf-Saunders, her second husband:

  “How unenterprising women were in the old days! Look at Aunt Lolly. Grandfather left her five hundred a year, and she was nearly thirty when he died, and yet she could find nothing better to do than to settle down with Mum and Dad, and stay there ever since.”

  “The position of single women was very different twenty years ago,” answered Mr. Wolf-Saunders. “Feme sole, you know, and feme couverte, and all that sort of rot.”

  Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best.

  The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, ci
vil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behavior imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.

  Observing those canons, no member of the Willowes family had risen to much eminence. Perhaps great-great-aunt Salome had made the nearest approach to fame. It was a decent family boast that great-great-aunt Salome’s puff-paste had been commended by King George III. And great-great-aunt Salome’s prayer-book, with the services for King Charles the Martyr and the Restoration of the Royal Family and the welfare of the House of Hanover—a nice example of impartial piety—was always used by the wife of the head of the family. Salome, though married to a Canon of Salisbury, had taken off her embroidered kid gloves, turned up her sleeves, and gone into the kitchen to mix the paste for His Majesty’s eating, her Venice-point lappets dangling above the floury bowl. She was a loyal subject, a devout churchwoman, and a good housewife, and the Willoweses were properly proud of her. Titus, her father, had made a voyage to the Indies, and had brought back with him a green parakeet, the first of its kind to be seen in Dorset. The parakeet was named Ratafee, and lived for fifteen years. When he died he was stuffed; and perched as in life upon his ring, he swung from the cornice of the china-cupboard surveying four generations of the Willowes family with his glass eyes. Early in the nineteenth century one eye fell out and was lost. The eye which replaced it was larger, but inferior both in lustre and expressiveness. This gave Ratafee a rather leering look, but it did not compromise the esteem in which he was held. In a humble way the bird had made county history, and the family acknowledged it, and gave him a niche in their own.

  Beside the china-cupboard and beneath Ratafee stood Emma’s harp, a green harp ornamented with gilt scrolls and acanthus leaves in the David manner. When Laura was little she would sometimes steal into the empty drawing-room and pluck the strings which remained unbroken. They answered with a melancholy and distracted voice, and Laura would pleasantly frighten herself with the thought of Emma’s ghost coming back to make music with cold fingers, stealing into the empty drawing-room as noiselessly as she had done. But Emma’s was a gentle ghost. Emma had died of a decline, and when she lay dead with a bunch of snowdrops under her folded palms a lock of her hair was cut off to be embroidered into a picture of a willow tree exhaling its branches above a padded white satin tomb. “That,” said Laura’s mother, “is an heirloom of your great-aunt Emma who died.” And Laura was sorry for the poor young lady who alone, it seemed to her, of all her relations had had the misfortune to die.