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Aug. 11th, 2024 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor years now I've been getting Lolly Willowes out of the library on ebook as a backup every time I go on a trip and then not getting around to it and thinking 'well, next time,' but the time finally came! What a strange and evocative little book. I knew 'Sylvia Townsend Warner' and 'about witches' and it turns out that did not in any way give me a correct impression of what it would be like.
Laura, the protagonist of Lolly Willowes, is a bit odd and dreamy and extremely Uninterested In Marriage; when her father dies and she can no longer live comfortably in a big country house with him doing as she likes, she goes to live with her brother and sister-in-law and their children. The children grow up; WWI occurs; her brother and sister-in-law give up on her marrying; nothing meaningfully changes for a full half of the book, until, suddenly, twenty years later, she is struck by a sudden profound and desperate conviction that she herself must make it change, picks a random remote location, and, to the bewilderment and disapproval of her entire family, settles in the town of Great Mop, in the Chilterns, Pop. 227.
Alone for the first time in decades, she goes for long rambles and cautiously befriends her landlady and assists with physical labor and is largely unbothered by the occasional strangeness of the village. Then her nephew -- of whom she has always been quite fond -- decides it would be lovely to come stay in her little town and experience her lovely little cottagecore lifestyle and attempt to write a book, and in his presence she finds that she is somehow trapped into being Aunt Lolly again, and all the great wonder and self-discovery of her escape has become small and domesticated.
Fortunately, Satan is there to help! and so Lolly makes a deal, and becomes a witch, which sounds quite dramatic, but isn't really any more than the rest of the book; Satan is exactly part and parcel of Laura's quiet freedom in Great Mop, bounded about by all the pettiness and silliness of the rest of the world, (including a great deal of the worship of Satan). Almost certainly Sylvia Townsend Warner wasn't the first to put into words the idea that if a woman isn't what society expects then she must become a witch [laudatory] but even to this date very few I think have expressed it with such -- prosaic isn't the word, because her writing is anything but that -- let's say close attention and interest to life in attentive, miniaturized, undramatic, and often quite funny detail.
Laura, the protagonist of Lolly Willowes, is a bit odd and dreamy and extremely Uninterested In Marriage; when her father dies and she can no longer live comfortably in a big country house with him doing as she likes, she goes to live with her brother and sister-in-law and their children. The children grow up; WWI occurs; her brother and sister-in-law give up on her marrying; nothing meaningfully changes for a full half of the book, until, suddenly, twenty years later, she is struck by a sudden profound and desperate conviction that she herself must make it change, picks a random remote location, and, to the bewilderment and disapproval of her entire family, settles in the town of Great Mop, in the Chilterns, Pop. 227.
Alone for the first time in decades, she goes for long rambles and cautiously befriends her landlady and assists with physical labor and is largely unbothered by the occasional strangeness of the village. Then her nephew -- of whom she has always been quite fond -- decides it would be lovely to come stay in her little town and experience her lovely little cottagecore lifestyle and attempt to write a book, and in his presence she finds that she is somehow trapped into being Aunt Lolly again, and all the great wonder and self-discovery of her escape has become small and domesticated.
Fortunately, Satan is there to help! and so Lolly makes a deal, and becomes a witch, which sounds quite dramatic, but isn't really any more than the rest of the book; Satan is exactly part and parcel of Laura's quiet freedom in Great Mop, bounded about by all the pettiness and silliness of the rest of the world, (including a great deal of the worship of Satan). Almost certainly Sylvia Townsend Warner wasn't the first to put into words the idea that if a woman isn't what society expects then she must become a witch [laudatory] but even to this date very few I think have expressed it with such -- prosaic isn't the word, because her writing is anything but that -- let's say close attention and interest to life in attentive, miniaturized, undramatic, and often quite funny detail.
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Date: 2024-08-13 03:35 am (UTC)