Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it was more of a shoulda coulda woulda.

When out walking, she makes a pact with a force that she takes to be Satan, to be free from such duties. As far as SWT is concerned, I’ve heard that her novels are all quite different from one another, which makes her an interesting proposition but somewhat tricky to categorise. While I haven’t read the Woolf, I understand that it taps into a similar theme – a woman’s need to establish some kind of a meaningful life for herself without the interference or dominance of others. It was believed that an unmarried woman needed the assistance of her family and it was never, ever considered appropriate for her to be on her own.Laura Willowes is first a companion to her father and then after his death goes to her brothers household, Aunt Lolly is how she is known from then on.

I couldn’t help but cheer for Laura in her quest for fulfilment and pleasure, all the more so given her resilient personality. The wind and the moon and the ranging cloud pack were not the only hunters abroad that night: something else was hunting among the hills, hunting slowly, deliberately, sure of its quarry. Now, for sure, Lolly Willowes is a shoo-in for The 100 Most Charming Oddities in English but one of the all time best?Warner proves to be a most devious hostess, however: seemingly invited to a pleasantly amusing afternoon garden party, it is only as the sun begins to set that it slowly begins to dawn—this is actually a Witch’s Sabbath! Divested of her easily-worn honors as mistress of the household, shorn of her long meandering country days, sleeping in a smart brass bedstead instead of her old and rather pompous four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and performing unaccustomed duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different person.

As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.

The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. I loved how the beginning is so conventional but then becomes less and less conventional and as you say surprising. But on the following summer the sandbags had rotted and burst and the barbed-wire had been absorbed into the farmer’s fences. It was not beauty at all that she wanted, or, depressed though she was, she would have bought a ticket to somewhere or other upon the Metropolitan railway and gone out to see the recumbent autumnal graces of the countryside.