Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). ‘“Penn Country” Branch, Rules, Aims, Objects and Membership, With an Introduction by Ralph M. Robinson’, Pamphlet No. 1, February 1931. The ruddy young man and his Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia's scarlet cloak trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them discolor with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from a young man'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. Why must a woman imagine herself an agent of the embodiment of all evil only so she can take long walks and refuse to fetch and carry for others and not feel bad about any of it? The greatest gift that the devil gives Laura is the gift of watching her nephew in distress and not caring. Why should the devil be the only one to understand why this would be a gift? Warner explains this, a bit, to the reader at the end, but I do not think she needed to. It was in the way Laura shuddered when Caroline’s deepest feeling was revealed to have to do with Christ’s folded grave garments, it was in the way she saw a small, helpless kitten as the sign of her witchhood, in how she felt she had to give up the pretty flowers she bought for herself to Caroline’s living room and how she didn’t scream when her brothers left her tied to the tree as a child, but carried on singing and dreaming until her father found her that evening. JamesDavid. ‘Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century’. In Regional Modernisms, edited by AlexanderNeal and MoranJames (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Lolly Willowes explores the ways that patriarchy can quietly, gently, lovingly deform a woman’s entire life.

The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. 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. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall. a something that was dark and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels, and by the voices of the birds of ill omen. She soon wonders: Did God, after casting out the rebel angels and before settling down to the peace of a heaven unpeopled of contradiction, use Adam as an intermediate step? Throughout the rest of the novel, Townsend Warner evokes the wild majesty of the land surrounding Great Mop. As Laura goes on long solitary walks through the lanes, fields, and forests, she opens up more and more to the wilderness around her, and in doing so, taps into a piece of herself that had remained buried until then. Laura also becomes aware of a darker power surrounding her.

With this opening, Townsend Warner establishes some key concerns: the disposition of single women as if they were furniture, the strong convention that single women needed to live under the care of a male guardian, and the conviction that this convention subsumed the wishes of any individual woman. Townsend Warner’s approach to exploring these themes is extraordinary, and therein lies the power of the novel. She structures Laura’s story to carry her readers along with Laura’s awakening to her own desires and powers. She does so with a deep understanding of the power of social conventions, a wry sense of humor, and the ability to express is beautiful, wild prose the powers of nature and Laura’s relationship to the land on a deep, almost primeval level. I emerged from this novel with a new favorite literary character, and a deep appreciation of Townsend Warner’s considerable skills as a writer and a social critic. This new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had thought of it as a denial of winter, a green spur that thrust through a tyrant's rusty armor. Now she saw it as something filial, gently unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek.” SquierSusan Merrill. Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). Let her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret, if she had one. […] Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a hand.

On one hand this is delightfully odd, gesturing to the literary tradition of English eccentrics. But, on another, there's a heartfelt and important message here about what it costs for a woman - middle aged, middle class, with a depleted private income - to find some space in which she is free from familial and societal expectations, a place to be herself, solitary if that's what she wants: A Room of One’s Own, indeed, as Virginia Woolf was to put it three years after this book was published. So when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks (with a crushed red geranium) and had bent over the greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank showed only a dark, shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in the old holy painting that hung in the dining room and was called the Leonardo. McRuerRobert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). In the final scene of the novel, Lolly encounters the Devil in person (or not – he could be just a man she encounters or even a figment of her imagination) and explains herself:

KnollBruce. ‘“An Existence Doled Out”: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes’, Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 344–363.

For Townsend Warner, this "concussion" came a few years after the triumphant publication of Lolly Willowes. She fell in love with the poet Valentine Acland, and spent the rest of her life in Dorset. From the 1930s to 70s, she contributed short stories to the New Yorker. She died in 1978. A Note on the Text AhmedSara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Waters, Sarah (2012). "Sylvia Townsend Warner: the neglected writer". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 July 2016. ButtsMary. ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1925). In ‘Ashe of Rings’ and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998).