3.5
Lolly Willowes
ByPublisher Description
Laura Willowes, known as "Lolly" to her relatives, is an invisible woman. She lives with her father in the countryside, until his death leads her to move in with her brother and sister-in-law, who live in London. She subsumes herself in being a good daughter, a good sister, and a good aunt: the perfect, dutiful spinster who can be counted on to do anything and complain about nothing.
But one cold, dreary, autumnal day, Lolly is struck by a great longing: Surely there is more to life than this? In an instant she resolves to leave London, her family, and her old life behind. Who wants to be a helpmeet when you can live alone, independently, in a tiny, remote village?
This resolution—and the panic it instills in Lolly's family—will lead to an even more surprising revelation: that Lolly Willowes would rather sell her soul to the Devil than become "dear old Aunt Lolly" ever again.
But one cold, dreary, autumnal day, Lolly is struck by a great longing: Surely there is more to life than this? In an instant she resolves to leave London, her family, and her old life behind. Who wants to be a helpmeet when you can live alone, independently, in a tiny, remote village?
This resolution—and the panic it instills in Lolly's family—will lead to an even more surprising revelation: that Lolly Willowes would rather sell her soul to the Devil than become "dear old Aunt Lolly" ever again.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLolly Willowes Reviews
3.5
“Not to my personal taste but it definitely has its interesting moments. Very dense and slow moving which isn’t helped by the lack of chapter breaks. The sentences are kind of unwieldy and end in a totally different place from where they started, which made it a bit hard to read/follow. I liked the cat and the gathering scene in part three. And Mrs leak! I liked her lots. Laura felt so distant from me despite us getting in her head, she has a particularly detached way of speaking. I found it difficult not to skim. But it’s a classic so I feel like I can’t knock it below 3.”
““They could not drive her out, or enslave her spirit anymore, nor shake her possession of the place she had chosen. While she lived her solitudes were hers inalienably; she and the kitten, the witch and the familiar, would live on at Great Mop, growing old together, and hearing the owls hoot from the winter trees.”
“All finalities whether, good or evil bestow a feeling of relief;”
“That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. . . . It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.”
Lolly Willowes is a slow read for such a short novel.
Our FMC, Laura, meanders through life wishing for freedom from the hum-drum existence of her life where she feels beholden to her family and the stifling expectations for women in the early 20th century. Well into her spinsterhood, she finally flees to Great Mop and begins to find happiness, only for her nephew, Titus, to infringe on her new life in the country. As such, she decides there is naught else to do except sign her soul over to Satan and become a witch, familiar and all.
At times, especially near the end, Lolly’s conversations with the devil felt quite surreal and increasingly creepy. Unfortunately, I felt disappointed that her route to “freedom” could only be achieved through the means of another man (the devil). So was she ever truly free?”
About Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a writer, musicologist, poet, and political activist. She began writing poetry in the early 1920s, publishing her best-known novel, Lolly Willowes, in 1926. In 1930, she moved to a village in Dorset, where she fell in love with the poet Valentine Ackland, who would become her lifelong partner. Ardently left wing, the two women became active in the Communist Party.
Other books by Sylvia Townsend Warner
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