Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is about people who become their roles and responsibilities, to the extent that they forget that they were ever anything else. But while her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely seaboards, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. 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.

So, reduced circumstances and all, Laura heads off to Great Mop where she must now take rooms in a cottage run by a somewhat idiosyncratic landlady, Mrs Leak.

Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. Going along with the family’s decision, Laura tries to make the best of things of London, helping Caroline with her children and other domestic duties.

From Everard [her father] she got a little still, from the family recipe-books much information and good advice; and where these failed her, Nicholas Culpepper or old Goody Andrews, who might have been Nicholas’s crony by the respect she had for the moon, were ready to help her out. As the jacket says, "an upper-class spinster rebels against her role as the universal aunt" and how does she do this?

The first part of the book is a cleverly drawn satire of the constricting middle-class family life that holds Laura Willowes in thrall as useful sister, sister-in-law and aunt Lolly. Despite that, I did enjoy Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing style; it was very poetic and also witty at times.

This is a book I want to read on a bench in a quiet park, in front of a fire in the winter, in bed with a mug of tea, in a bay window looking out on a rocky Maine coast. 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. Most of the story recounts Laura’s life, from her family’s backstory, to her years living with her relatives. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fire-place? This was about the first 2/3 of the novel and finally, it shifts into something quite different and abnormal.Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night! But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her.