Lolly Willowes: Or, The Loving Huntsman

by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mona Awad (Introduction)

Overview

A satirical feminist classic about a woman who leaves her stifling place in her brother's London home for the wilds of the English countryside, where she meets and makes a deal with the devil himself.

Laura "Lolly" Willowes is an unmarried, middle-aged woman in early twentieth century London--a spinster who for the past twenty years has lived with, and in service of, her brother's overbearing family. With her brother's children now grown and out of the house, Lolly shocks her family by making a choice for herself: to move, alone, to the country.

Once she arrives, Lolly carves out a life for herself in this lush and wild land, finding independence and a peace that she has never before experienced. Unfortunately, the family can't quite let go of Lolly, and her nephew shows up unannounced to move in to her country home. So long ruled by her family's expectations, Lolly makes a rash decision to solve her problems. With a subversive wit, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s feminist classic poses the question—what would a woman do to ensure her freedom?

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593449332
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Series:	Modern Library Torchbearers
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176

About the Author

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was an English writer of novels, poetry, and short stories. She was born to a distinguished history teacher at the Harrow School, and grew up in the world of academics. At an early age Warner showed an interest in musicology, and before beginning her writing career she was a researcher of fifteenth- and sixteenth century music.  Warner wrote seven novels, eight poetry collections, and sixteen short story collections, and contributed short stories to The New Yorker for over forty years.

Editorial Reviews

"In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster’s struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson."
—New York Review of Books

"[The book] I’ll be pressing into people’s hands forever is Lolly Willowes, the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness. 
—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times Book Review

"A great shout of life and individuality."
—Justine Jordan, The Guardian

"I wish I could understand how fluidly [Lolly Willows] handles times and how it manages to be both utterly savage and strangely gentle at once. The turns of phrase that gleam on every page often seem nearly miraculous to me.
—Garth Greenwell, Lithub

Sylvia Townsend Warner's brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved. In Lolly Willowes, her first novel, she moves with somber confidence into the realm of the supernatural, and her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it. This is the witty, eerie, tender but firm life history of a middle-class Englishwoman who politely declines to make the expected connection with the opposite sex and becomes a witch instead.
—John Updike

From the Publisher