Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

It doesn’t seem five minutes since I last wrote a review of Lolly Willowes – well it’s a little longer than that, but it is only about two years.

Coincidentally, my very small book group chose to read Lolly Willowes (my suggestion, I admit) for our December meet up, the very same month that the Librarything Virago group are reading the books of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Despite having a pretty good recollection of Lolly Willowes, I decided I would re-read it. It was just lovely meeting up with Laura again – one of my friends in my book group, said last night when we met, that she wanted to be Laura Willowes when she grows up – I think that’s exactly how I felt about her too when I first read the book.

Apologies but due to feeling a bit under the weather I haven’t completely re-written my old review – I am simply pasting (and editing) parts of my old review here for anyone who may have missed it. If you want to see what the book group thought of the novel – jump to the end. (There may be mild spoilers).

“…she looked with the yearning of an outcast at the dwelling so long ago discarded. The house was like an old blind nurse sitting in the sun and ruminating past events. It seemed an act of the most horrible ingratitude to leave it all and go away without one word of love. But the gates were shut, the time of welcome was gone by.”

The story itself is tender and a little magical, and I adored the character of Lolly Willowes herself. Laura Willowes (to allow her, her given name) is a dutiful unmarried daughter of twenty-eight when her beloved father dies. Laura had always enjoyed her quiet life in the country, sometimes gathering herbs and making distillations with them. Laura is at one with the countryside, and its yearly round of traditions. Born some years after her two elder brothers; Henry and James, Laura grew up almost as an only child, the apple of her father’s eye. Laura has run her father’s home with ease, helped by the servants, people of good old country stock, who make beeswax furniture polish and pigeon pie. Upon her father’s death Laura is devastated; everything she knows and feels secure in is lost. Her elder brothers and their wives take control, it is quickly decided – that despite Laura having a good income of her own left to her by her father – she should go away from the country to London and live with Henry and Caroline and their two young daughters. Between them; Henry, James and their wives make all the decisions, what furniture Laura will take with her, and how useful she will be. London life will be very different, but Laura submits to the decisions made for her.

Of course, Laura is useful, for that is how she is made, she proves herself invaluable. It is one of Henry’s young daughters who bestow the name Aunt Lolly on Laura – and the name sticks, and Laura is Laura no longer, her life no longer her own. Laura settles her things into the small spare room in the London House that she will now call her own, while her brother and sister-in-law set about introducing her to potential, suitable husbands.

For twenty years Aunt Lolly makes herself indispensable to family life in London. Holidays are taken at Lady Place, her former home where her brother James his wife and son Titus live. Aunt Lolly is taken for granted, she is so very reliable. The years slip by quickly – the girls grow up and begin to make lives for themselves. A war is fought; the world is a different place. In the 1920s Laura finds, at forty-seven, that she wants something different for herself. She has the feeling that something is pulling her towards the countryside again, she longs for woods, and hillsides. Laura decides to break free of the life which has been organised for her realising suddenly that she can have a life of her own. Laura’s realisation coming in a greengrocer’s shop of a quite old-fashioned kind;

“Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.”

Laura finds herself drawn to the countryside of Buckinghamshire, and the tiny village of Great Mop. Her family are both horrified and astonished at Laura’s announcement, and at first, they don’t take her quite seriously. Meekly accepting the outrageous mismanagement of her money by Henry; Laura realises she can only afford to rent a couple of rooms in the cottage of Mrs Leek. Here in two small rooms and roaming free in the countryside that surrounds the cottage, Aunt Lolly becomes Laura again, her happiness is complete, and she finds within herself the woman she should always have been. There appear to be unusual forces around the village of Great Mop and the nearby countryside, forces with which Laura is at one. Here the story does get a little odd – the reader has to suspend belief a bit, that’s all. When Titus turns up to stay with his good old Aunt Lolly; his presence upsets the delicately balanced atmosphere of the area, and unleashes forces, that finally bring Laura to an understanding of who she really is.

Published three years before Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Lolly Willowes is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s assertion that all single women should have their own liberty and lives of their own not dictated for them by others.

There are now six regular members who meet as part of what I have come to call my very small book group. Five of us I think it is fair to say loved Lolly Willowes. The sixth member while not actually hating it, was less enthusiastic, but not every member of a group can feel the same about a book, that’s what makes book groups interesting. Being December, the city centre gets very busy which gives us a good excuse to swerve our usual Café Nero haunt and book a table at Pizza Express. So, there is just a chance that Romano pizzas, dough balls and cheesecake got in the way of literary discussion. However, we get around to discussing the novel as well.

We discussed how Laura had been treated almost like a child by her family, who swept her up in their decision making for her, never allowing Laura an opinion. One member suggested that she is treated like a piece of old furniture, removed to London for the family’s convenience. There was some discussion about whether Laura would have had more of a role in life had she not been born into a relatively prosperous family. I suspect had Laura been working lass she would have revelled in a supervisory role of some kind, more able to lead her own life at least. It didn’t occur to anyone in that conventional household, that Laura might want a different life – that she might enjoy being on her own, and not dancing attendance on her brothers’ children. One of the most enjoyable elements of course for all of us – and I am sure many readers of Lolly Willowes is witnessing that re-emergence of Laura (no longer Aunt Lolly) – a woman at one with the natural world – a woman who makes a pact with the devil to free herself. Several of us found Laura’s acceptance of Satan into her life quite entertaining, I loved the way she just looked down at that kitten that appears in her rooms and knows exactly from where he has come. Another question we asked – and I’m not sure I entirely know the answer – was just what the reaction to this novel was in 1926 when it was first published – Wikipedia suggests that it was well received.