Modernism/modernity

In 1999, The New York Review of Books reprinted Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes, as part of its eclectic “Classics” series. Reading this now widely accessible work—first published in 1926—alongside more familiar texts of the period alters our perspective on the landscape of modernist British fiction; but not only, I want to suggest, for the reasons that have thus far been offered. In her introduction to the reprinted novel, Alison Lurie presents Lolly Willowes as a revolutionary feminist text disguised as “a charming British fantasy about witchcraft.”¹ The novel, which has as its protagonist a spinster aunt who becomes a witch in midlife and who delivers an impassioned critique of patriarchal society at its conclusion, was a “surprise international best seller” upon its initial release, and indeed was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. According to Lurie, Warner’s narrative spoke most to “single women of all ages,” anticipating Virginia Woolf’s radical call for the need of “a room of one’s own.” While Woolf “spoke, we know now, for thousands of women then and in years to come,” Lurie proudly declares that “Sylvia Townsend Warner had spoken for them first” (LY, xiii). Critics writing both before and after Lurie have largely shared her tendency to read Warner’s earliest published experiment in fiction as a work located firmly within, and to a large extent delimited by, what Brooke Allen has labeled a “purely feminist zone.”² That is, when the novel has not been dismissed outright as a work of “total fantasy gratification,” to quote Gillian Beer, Lolly Willowes’s radical nature as a feminist tract (whether successful or failed) which uses witchcraft as an allegory for the liberation of European women from everyday [End Page 709] oppression, has been taken as the primary reason for recuperating it as a significant work of twentieth-century women’s writing.³

While such an assessment of the novel’s revolutionary potential is not inaccurate, I would argue that it flattens Warner’s sly, slippery, and perverse text by forcing it into the genre of the manifesto. In this article, I wish to resist the impulse to reduce Warner’s novel to a feminist manifesto by attending to its subtle and reanimating play with works of art. I hope to show how the novel’s feminist engagements cannot be fully appreciated apart from its use of narrative witchcraft, or its deployment of what I call its arts of dispossession. Removed from their frames, Warner reveals in her play with a Leonardo portrait, a Henry Fuseli painting, and a woodcut of a witch hunter, the often stealthy interpenetrations between the realms of aesthetics and politics, narrative, and witchcraft. More than a “charming British fantasy” that masks its radical feminist potential through allegory, Lolly Willowes can be read as a fiction that disturbs the imperial grasp and gaze of patriarchal possession through a delicate and devious process of conjuring, animating, and reanimating two-dimensional images. Calling forth each image “rather like the Witch of Endor calling up old Samuel” (LY, 115) (Fig. 1), as we are told the landlady and witch, Mrs. Leak, dispassionately conjures up her neighbors through her speech, Warner’s narrative proceeds to manipulate the shape and boundaries of the image, giving each one new lives, and in so doing, coolly evacuating possession of its power. This novel can be read alongside the works of Woolf and other modernist writers, not only for its interest in “the current condition of women,” as Lurie notes (LY, xii), but also, and perhaps more interestingly, for its profound revision of the novelistic imagination through its unsettling of works of art, enacting a shift from an aesthetics of creation to one of memory and witness. Regarded in this light, Lolly Willowes embodies a far more subtle politics and a more deeply nuanced challenge to the unequal power relations engendered by patriarchy than previous accounts of the novel have yet accounted for.

One fruitful place in which to begin a reassessment of Lolly Willowes and its potential to reshape our conception of Warner’s larger aesthetic...