Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Novel That Nobody Has Read

Lolly Willowes and the Specifically English Witchcraft That Is Also Feminism

Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner published Lolly Willowes in 1926 and it is the first novel of which I know in English literature to treat witchcraft not as horror or as superstition but as a reasonable response by a middle-aged woman to the specific oppression of the lives available to middle-aged women in early twentieth-century England. Laura Willowes becomes a witch in the novel’s second half not through corruption but through the specific recognition that the Devil offers an alternative to the domestic imprisonment that the first half documented. Bohiney and The London Prat covered the week. More at prat.uk/author/violet-woolf. Satire: waterfordwhispersnews.com.

What the Alternative Is

The alternative the Devil offers is not the supernatural drama of the Gothic novel. It is solitude, purposefulness, and the specific freedom of being accountable to something other than a family’s expectations. Warner’s witchcraft is the escape from the family into a relationship with a force that is interested in the self rather than in the self’s usefulness to others. Published in 1926. Reads like 2024.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK