This is by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978). Published in 1926, it was her first novel, and it's one of those double-title books: Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman. Who the "loving huntsman" is we'll come to in a minute.

It was another Henry Eliot recommendation, and featured in his list of autumnal classics. (I'm loving Henry Eliot's Substack, by the way. He introduces me to all sorts of great writers I've never heard of, and organizes "read-alongs".)

Townsend Warner is indeed a writer I'd never heard of, but she had a colourful life. Music scholar; friend of the Bloomsbury Group; novelist, critic, and translator; Communist Party member and Spanish Civil War volunteer; and partner of poet Valentine Ackland -- it sounds as though there was rarely a dull moment.


Sylvia Townsend Warner

The narrative opens in 1902. On the death of her father, Laura Willowes (then 28) goes to live with elder brother Henry and his family in London. She doesn't have much say in the matter, although she knows she'll miss all the things in her erstwhile country home: The greenhouse, the apple-room, the potting-shed; the making of beeswax polish and marmalade; the brushing and airing of the stuffed animals; the Midsummer Night's Eve picnic and the traditional birthday dinners; and the possibility of following up her interest in botany and brewing (the latter craft was her father's business, but pursued by Laura as a hobby).

When she moves, Caroline, her sister-in-law, regrets the loss of a spare room. But she thinks London will be good for Laura: "She would have to make haste if she were going to find a husband before she was thirty." Laura has never shown any inclination to get married, and continues to show none, even as "eligible" young men are herded her way. And she's a bit sceptical about marriage generally, feeling that it has definitely not been good for Henry: "Caroline was a good woman and a good wife. She was slightly self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she yielded to Henry’s judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices... She fed his vanity, and ministered to his imperiousness."

So Laura exists in a sort of stasis. It's comfortable, but painfully dull, and she has no freedom to just be and do what she likes. She always has to be busy, in an unsatisfying kind of way: "Caroline never sat with idle hands; she would knit, or darn, or do useful needlework. Laura could not sit opposite her and do nothing. There was no useful needlework for her to do, Caroline did it all, so Laura was driven to embroidery. Each time that a strand of silk rasped against her fingers she shuddered inwardly... Indeed, it was surprising how much there was to do, and for everybody in the house. Even Laura, introduced as a sort of extra wheel, soon found herself part of the mechanism, and, interworking with the other wheels, went round as busily as they."

Even her name is imposed on her: "Caroline did not know what the children would do without their Aunt Lolly. Every one spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had almost forgotten her baptismal name." Laura becomes two people: Aunt Lolly and Miss Willowes. But never Laura.

Holidays are taken, but they are dull holidays. Even the war, despite the tragedy it brings (one of her nieces marries hastily, and her husband is killed), ultimately boils down to routine. Laura works as a parcel-packer (parcels for the troops, that is). She notes the fading patriotic posters in her workplace: "[She] watched them discolour with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from young men’s cheeks, and from Britannia’s mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her."

And once the war is over, everything picks up as normal again. Normally dull, that is.


Not the version I read (which came from Gutenberg), but a nice cover, way more subtle than the early editions came up with

Laura, for all her patience, is drawing close to a breakout. We've seen, for example, the crazy joke (about werewolves) that drove away one possible suitor. And we've learnt that autumn is a time that particularly stirs her up. As Part 2 begins, we find out more about that feeling: "Had the coming of autumn quickened in her only an experienced grief she would not have dreaded it thus, nor felt so restless and tormented. Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘Now! Now!’ it said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from the trees that it might stare at her more imperiously... Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial."

This autumnal fever strikes every year. But it's over by the end of November, and in the meanwhile, she fortifies herself with roasted chestnuts, and second-hand bookshops, and expensive soaps, and marron glaces, and hothouse flowers.

On one solitary London outing, she finds a shop on Moscow Road: "It was small and homely. Fruit and flowers and vegetables were crowded together in countrified disorder. On the sloping shelf in the window, among apples and rough-skinned cooking pears and trays of walnuts, chestnuts, and filberts, was a basket of eggs, smooth and brown, like some larger kind of nut. At one side of the room was a wooden staging. On this stood jars of home-made jam and bottled fruits. It was as though the remnants of summer had come into the little shop for shelter. On the floor lay a heap of earthy turnips."

She ponders the origin of all these riches, imagining the lushness: "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, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves." She buys a huge bunch of chrysanthemums, and then goes to a bookshop, and buys a guidebook to the Chilterns...

Soon afterwards, she announces to her uncomprehending family her intention of going to live in Great Mop...


We're not told which bit of the Chilterns Laura settles in, but they do spill over into Oxfordshire, where we made an autumnal visit this year

Henry is very Henry about Laura's idea: "You have hurt me, I admit." Nice bit of manipulation. And then he confesses he has misinvested her money... OK, she says, I'll move to Great Mop in more straitened circumstances.

Having moved and taken rooms with one Mrs Leak, Laura adopts a much more fluid lifestyle: "During the afternoon she ... fell asleep. On the following morning she fell asleep again, in a beech-wood, curled up in a heap of dead leaves. After that she had no more trouble. Life becomes simple if one does nothing about it. Laura did nothing about anything for days and days till Mrs. Leak said: ‘We shall soon be having Christmas, miss.’ Christmas! So it had caught them all again."

There's something peculiar about Great Mop that she can't quite fathom. But never mind. More important to Laura is finding out "her own secret". Revelation is elusive. She teeters on the brink of understanding, but then it flicks off out of reach. She feels increasingly one with nature (and Townsend Warner's nature descriptions are really lovely), and she experiences a kind of release. But there's something missing.

The catalyst for her self-discovery is her nephew, Titus (the son of the younger of her two brothers). Unlike Caroline, who visits Great Mop, and is clearly keen to get away again, Titus visits, and likes it. In fact, he likes it so much that he wants to live there. Far from welcoming this family support, Laura feels weighed down by it. Great Mop is HERS: "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... Day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself further from her... When she was with him she came to heel and resumed her old employment of being Aunt Lolly. There was no way out... They were come out to recapture her, they had tracked her down and closed her in."

This is what provokes her wild cry for help, sent out to the four winds. And this is what brings the strange sensation that she has been heard, and is being answered. There has been some kind of pledge...


Perhaps Mrs Leak let out rooms in a cottage like this...

When Laura gets home she finds a stray kitten. Which she gradually realizes is destined to be her familiar. Which means... "Not for a moment did she doubt. But so deadly, so complete was the certainty that it seemed to paralyse her powers of understanding, like a snake-bite in the brain... She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil."

She feels empowered. She feels as though Satan has waited for her in Great Mop: "Sure of her -- she supposed -- he had done little for nine months but watch her. Near at hand but out of sight the loving huntsman couched in the woods, following her with his eyes." True, he's "a little jaded" on account of "the success of his latest organised Flanders battue". Yet, he still must hunt.

So, the loving huntsman is the devil...

Mrs Leak turns out to be a witch too, and takes Laura to her first Witches' Sabbath. This is portrayed quite amusingly, and Laura is disconcerted to find the event replicates the discomfort of all the social occasions of her youth.

Eventually, she meets Satan in person, in the guise of a gamekeeper.

And poor Titus is driven out (in the nicest possible way).

There's one more, quite extensive conversation with Satan, who's presenting himself as a gardener this time. He has a few things to reveal:

1. "Once a wood, always a wood," he tells her. He sees through the veneer of civilization and development: "The goods yard at Paddington, for instance -- a savage place! as holy and enchanted as ever it had been... Wolves howled through the streets of Paris, the foxes played in the throneroom of Schoenbrunn, and in the basement at Apsley Terrace the mammoth slowly revolved, trampling out its lair." That's perhaps the creepiest passage of the whole book...

2. He also tells her she is now in his power -- but that's not a problem, because she will never WANT to escape him.



Then SHE tells him quite a few things. Which is interesting, because nobody else in the whole novel has ever really listened to Laura. This bit, which leads us to the end of the book, is worth quoting at length, because it says so much not only about Laura but about millions of other women (both then and now):

"I think you are a kind of black knight, wandering about and succouring decayed gentlewomen," she begins. He reminds her that there are also warlocks, but she continues: "I can’t take warlocks so seriously, not as a class. It is we witches who count. We have more need of you. Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance... 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."

Women are constantly talked at, she says (decades before we invented the term mansplaining...). "It sounds very petty to complain about," she goes on, "but 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. Settling down!... There is a dreadful kind of dreary immortality about being settled down on by one day after another... They are like trees towards the end of summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their leaves surprising, or notices them till they fall off."

And she reverts to the scourge of forced (and useless) activity: "If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn’t matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses them up -- when they might sit in their doorways and think -- to be doing still!... Some may get religion, then they’re all right, I expect. But for the others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real... And think, Satan, what a compliment you pay her, pursuing her soul, lying in wait for it, following it through all its windings, crafty and patient and secret like a gentleman out killing tigers."

The world gives women like her tedious presents of soul-numbing practicality, she complains: "But you say: 'Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest made of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.' That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure... One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that -- to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day."

Stylistically, this is perhaps too heavy an information-drop at the end. But it resonates. You feel viscerally how frustrating women's lives must have been, and how hard they had to fight (a la Sayers or a la Barnes) to break out into something THEY wanted to do.

Later, staying out late, Laura revels in her freedom (witchy people like Mrs Leak make very tolerant landladies, it seems), and rejoices that she can spend the night in the open without needing to fear any devilry: "Satan going his rounds might come upon her and smile to see her lying so peaceful and secure in his dangerous keeping. But he would not disturb her. Why should he? The pursuit was over, as far as she was concerned... A closer darkness upon her slumber, a deeper voice in the murmuring leaves overhead -- that would be all she would know of his undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership."

And that's how the book ends.



Townsend Warner's lovely turns of phrase make her terribly quotable, and I need to show some restraint. But I can't resist showing you this: "During dinner Laura looked at her relations. She felt as though she had awoken, unchanged, from a twenty-years slumber, to find them almost unrecognisable. She surveyed them, one after the other. Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations -- accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience of normal boilers and normal policemen."

"Carpeted with experience." How meaning-laden. We really don't want to get like that...

As Justine Jordan says, the novel reads like "a great shout of life and individuality". And it was well received in its day -- too well, according to Townsend Warner, who compained that people "told me that it was charming, that it was distinguished, and my mother said it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And my heart sank lower and lower; I felt as though I had tried to make a sword, only to be told what a pretty pattern there was on the blade."

Kristen Hanley Cardozo describes what became an "international bestseller" as "a surprise success among people who saw themselves as liberated and modern", and points out that it was the very first Book of the Month Club selection. Kate Macdonald notes that Lolly Willowes was "one of the first of a sudden eruption of novels about witches to hit the market in Britain in the middle of the 1920s. Warner didn’t quite set a fashion, but she was at the crest of a wave."

Of course, you might ask, as Eloise Millar does, whether Laura's breakout doesn't involve her in another kind of servitude. Her new life, infinitely preferable though she finds it, "is still dictated by a male presence". True, but I think Townsend Warner is asking us to think how outrageously unsatisfying a life must be for servitude to Satan to seem the best possible option... Hanley Cardozo puts this very well: "What Sylvia Townsend Warner saw was that patriarchy is not always a blow from a closed fist, but often the enclosure of an enveloping shawl, wrapped forcibly with love and concern, around someone who doesn’t want it and is already too warm... Women are loved, in this world, not as individuals, but as archetypes. What [the book] Lolly Willowes imagines, and what [the character] Laura Willowes eventually attains, is a world where women can go out in the cold."

Macdonald also reminds us that this book came out three years BEFORE Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own...

In sum, big tick, and definitely an author who's worth exploring further.