158. Sylvia Townsend Warner — Lolly Willowes with Sarah Watling

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my cohost, Amy Helmes. The book we're discussing today is about a woman who breaks the mold in a most bewitching fashion. The author who wrote it. You could say she did, too.

AMY HELMES: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, (or The Loving Huntsman is the subtitle), features a heroine who, as an unmarried woman, has been written off and relegated to the role of spinster. She's everyone's favorite auntie, but she feels like an invisible woman.

KIM: Not everyone is discounting the spinster though.

AMY: That's right. The loving huntsman of the book's subtitle sees our heroine for who she really is. The spell he casts on her allows her to approach life in a bold new way. Who might this savior, this dark knight, possibly be? Oh, I don't know. Could it be Satan? 

KIM: That's a Church Lady reference for you “SNL” fans out there.

AMY: Yeah. The Prince of Darkness turns out to be her Prince Charming of sorts. This early feminist classic, it was Townsend Warner's debut novel, actually, it's so fun. It is quaint, and yet it's also incendiary in terms of its social commentary, and Kim, the visual I get is one of Sylvia Townsend Warner crouching behind a chintz sofa and then occasionally popping up to lob a hand grenade.

KIM: I love it. Yep.

AMY: In 2014, The Guardian listed this book among its 100 best novels in English, and director Greta Gerwig is a fan of the book, too, which certainly speaks for it. Our friend and two time guest on this podcast, Lucy Scholes, described it in a 2012 review as “an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era.”

KIM: We've got another guest joining us for today's episode, Sarah Watling. She knows quite a bit about Sylvia Townsend Warner.

In fact, she's got a new book out in which Warner features.

AMY: By the pricking of my thumbs. I think we'd better raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Sarah Watling, is the author of 2019's biography, Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters; Four Lives in Seven Fragments. It's the story of four brilliant, beautiful, and precocious English sisters who led fascinating lives in the first half of the 20th century. D. H. Lawrence thought these sisters were quote-unquote “wrong,” and if that's not reason enough to learn more, I don't know what is.

AMY: Yeah, I actually have this one all lined up on my Kindle ready to go because I have a long flight coming up. Um, I was like, ooh, I'm going to read this one on the plane. 

SARAH WATLING: It's nice and long. It'll keep you going for a long time.

AMY: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, Sarah's latest work is Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, a group biography of a handful of creative minded women, including several lost ladies of lit, from America and Britain, who took a strong political stance during the Spanish Civil War while attempting to rally others to the cause. Sylvia Townsend Warner is just one of the impassioned writers featured in this scholarly work, which The Daily Mail calls “exhilarating.”

KIM: Yes. And Sarah admits to having a weakness for people with an instinct for rebellion, which pretty much makes her the perfect guest to talk about Sylvia Townsend Warner. Sarah, welcome to the show.

SARAH: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

AMY: So Sarah, my interest in the Spanish Civil War was piqued a few years ago when we did an episode on the war reporter Virginia Cowles, who pops up a few times in your book, I think. What actually prompted you to write this book?

SARAH: Well, I mean, I've been interested in the Spanish Civil War for a really long time, partly because it's so often been regarded as this kind of tragic missed opportunity to defeat fascism before the Second World War. But I really didn't think that I had something new to say about it. until I came across this pamphlet that was published in 1937 called Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. And this was essentially a collection of responses from authors from Britain and Ireland, to a question that had been posed to them by a woman called Nancy Cunard. And she had asked them very simply to just state publicly whether they supported the Democratic Republic of Spain, the government that had been elected the year before in Spain, or the military generals who were attempting to overthrow that democratic government. When she wrote to these writers, she said to them they should make their position plain because it is impossible any longer to take no side. And I was really struck by that idea that, you know, history could present a moment when it was almost a kind of moral imperative to work out where you stood, which to me sort of felt like it spoke to our contemporary moment in various ways. I was interested, Nancy Cunard had chosen to direct this question to writers, you know. I wondered why she felt that writers in particular should take a position on politics. And also I was like, who is this woman? You know, like it was, it was such a kind of bold and impassioned. political intervention to make and, and what I knew about the Spanish Civil War really came from people like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, you know, and the more I delved into Nancy Cunard's story, the more I realized that actually there were so many other writers who were mobilized by this cause, but who just really hadn't received the same kind of airtime and lots of them were women.

KIM: So in the book, you write about Sylvia Townsend Warner's political and literary activity during this fight against fascism. One might initially think it doesn't really have much to do with the plot of her debut novel Lolly Willowes, which came out in 1926. This book is more of a light comedy of manners, but there is actually a synergy between this novel and the outspoken political role she would go on to have later in life, right?

SARAH: I mean, in person, Sylvia Townsend Warner could be extremely outspoken. You know, one of the things that happens when she's first drawn into anti fascist activism is that she discovers she has this incredible flair for heckling, which she's really proud of, you know. but in her fiction, I think she was a lot more kind of wily about getting her point across. And there is so much that's going on under the surface in Lolly Willowes, which to me makes it quite clear that, you know, she was already dissatisfied with the way that conventional society operated, even before she got involved in what we might consider sort of organized politics.

AMY: So, Sylvia Townsend Warner lived from 1893 till 1973, and she once famously said, When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people, uh, speaking to your point of heckling. Um, so we usually start an episode talking about the author's life first, but I think in this case it makes more sense to switch things up and talk about the novel first.

KIM: Yeah. And listeners, it's pretty much impossible to discuss this novel, really, without revealing a bit of a spoiler about what happens to Lolly in the book.

AMY: Yeah, but it's not that big of a secret, it's pretty much... always talked about on every blurb you'll find about the book online. The edition I read, kind of, the cover art says it. So I think we'll be fine in saying it.

KIM: Yeah. And we'll get to that twist in a moment. But first, Sarah, let's talk about who Laura, AKA Lolly Willowes is at the start of this novel. Do you want to describe her a little bit for us?

SARAH: Of course. So, well, the way that Warner describes her in the novel is as a gentle creature. Um, so someone who's adored by the children in her family, for example, which is important because when we first meet her, she's moving into her brother's house where she's going to sort of help take care of his children. She's 28, she's not married, and she's been living, you know, in the ancestral family home with her father, who's just passed away. And from this very first line of the novel, Laura Willowes is kind of situated for us by reference to her family, and specifically the men in her family. So the first line reads, When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her elder brother and his family. So this is kind of her passing from the care, or depending on how you look at it, the property of her father to that of her brother. And we immediately sort of have this sense of someone whose life is dictated by other people's expectations rather than somebody who's exercising, you know, a great deal of autonomy. And that's also hinted at in the next sentence, which is spoken by her sister in law, Caroline, who says, “Of course, you will come to us.” You know, and that “of course” is holding so much kind of inevitability. You know, no one is really expecting Laura to have any plans or ideas of her own. Um, and everybody thinks it will be good for her to move to London because there's more people there. And so there's a better chance that she'll find a husband before it's, you know, too late because late twenties is getting a little bit late to get married. Um. And I think another important thing that we come to learn about Laura is her connection to sort of the natural world and to the earth and to cultivation. And that's something that will become more and more important, I think, as the novel goes on. Um, you know, at the beginning of the novel, she's in mourning for her father, but she's also already mourning for this life in the countryside that she's going to have to leave behind. In the novel, it's.

It says London was very full and exciting, but it undercuts that immediately by listing all the things that London doesn't have, you know, like her greenhouse and her apple room and her potting shed and all of the spaces where she can sort of create the natural remedies that she's taught herself to make.

AMY: Yeah, this, uh, beginning part of the book really reminded me a lot of Joanna Scutts’s nonfiction book The Extra Woman, just in terms of, you know, what happens to these unattached women. In Lolly's case, she is kind of just passed around. Townsend Warner writes, Feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, Laura was ready to be disposed of as they should think best. So she's like a piece of furniture or something. Um, she also later says that Laura was put away. So it's kind of that idea of a woman on the shelf.

KIM: Yeah. And the way she just sort of is like accepting of it too. everybody's complicit in this “extra woman” thing.

AMY: Yeah, and The family members are all patting themselves on the back, like, We're so charitable to this single, you know, sister, and oh, we're going to give her the second best bedroom because we have to save the best bedroom for real guests, but she can have this sort of smaller bedroom.

KIM: Where she's working for free, basically, like, she's going to be the nanny. She's going to be the companion. She's going to run the extra errands. You know, she's busy from morning till night.

SARAH: There's that line that I think is so brilliant when Townsend Warner is describing Caroline's planning for Laura's arrival and she says, They could not give up the large spare room to Lolly. You know, like it's not even explained. It's just this kind of assumption that really exposes the way that they regard Lolly as this kind of, you know, extra wheel that they're doing this big favor to.

AMY: I think she refers to herself as an inmate. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. And it's all in this kind of gentle way that it's explained but yet this undercurrent of like, Wow, this is pretty mean and harsh. So, the novel is actually fairly short. It's divided into three sections. The first section is pretty conventional. We see her attempts to settle into this new life as a guest, basically in her brother's home. She has no agency. She's stuck at home with her sister in law doing needle point and cleaning the canary cage, right? She feels trapped.

AMY: Yeah, and also in this section we learn a little bit about Lolly's childhood. She was sort of a tomboy who had taken an interest in brewing and botany as Sarah was talking about. So this is a bit of foreshadowing for what's to come. There's also a great line where Townsend Warner writes that “coming out,” like for young women debutantes, we have this idea of “coming out,” but it really ought to be called “going in,” which I thought was great. I had never heard that before because it's sort of like, when she got to that age, life stopped for her. The life that she wanted stopped. 

KIM: So, Sarah, is any of this lining up with Sylvia's own childhood at all? Did she have a similar childhood to Laura Willowes in any sense?

SARAH: I mean, I think there's definitely an interesting parallel in the father daughter relationships. Um, so in the novel, Laura's father is really delighted when she's born to have a daughter. Laura's brothers are much older. They're sent away to boarding school. So most of her childhood, it's almost as if she's an only child, which Sylvia Townsend Warner was as well. Um, and Laura's father really dotes on her and her mother is, you know, it's not really gone into much detail, but her mother is some kind of invalid. So. Laura Is pretty much kind of left to her own devices, which means that she and her father can live this kind of perfectly happy, quite quiet life together, which continues even after her mother dies and then of course, it kind of ends completely when her father dies. As I said, Sylvia Townsend Warner was actually an only child. Um, and though her mother was around for her whole childhood, she was especially close to her father, George. And he was kind of an ideal father for a future writer. He was a schoolmaster at Harrow, which is a kind of, it was a fairly prestigious public school, as in fee paying school in England. And he had this reputation for being a really brilliant teacher. Um, his subject was history, but he was very strong on the importance of good style in writing. And he wrote his own books. He also wrote poetry. So while Sylvia Townsend Warner didn't have a formal education, she did have the benefit of these kind of private lessons with the most brilliant teacher at a really good and expensive school. And she became extremely erudite very young, which also made her quite off putting to potential suitors, which is another connection.

AMY: Yeah, that's exactly what is going on with Laura in the book, which is hilarious. Um, her relatives are all like, Alright, we'll keep her here in London with us for however long we need to, but hopefully we can get her married off. She is not exactly cooperative, right, Sarah?

SARAH: Right. And, and what I especially love is how Townsend Warner manages to refer to the men they line up for her as undertakers. It means it as in men who might undertake to marry Laura, but it's a wonderful kind of double meaning about, you know, the role they would play in her life if she actually married any of them. But yeah, I mean, Laura in the novel, she seems to have almost a kind of passive resistance to these potential suitors that her brother brings home, and she makes no real effort to please them or to appear attractive or interesting to them. Uh, Warner says that She did not feel herself bound to feign a degree of entertainment which she had not experienced. And the same deficiency made her insensible to the duty of every marriageable young woman to be charming. And as Sylvia herself liked to, you know, Laura would kind of turn the conversation to obscure topics or say things that these kind of conventional men will find really off putting. And I think part of the problem is that, you know, she just talks about whatever's on her mind and because she's surrounded by all these people who are so different from her, what's on her mind is almost never like what they're actually discussing at the dinner table. One brilliant example is that she manages to scare off the most serious suitor that she has by talking about werewolves.

KIM: Yes.

SARAH: She sort of ends up by implying that maybe he could be a werewolf, which obviously, you know, would not be a very respectable thing to be.

AMY: It's just a total record scratch moment. Yeah. Okay, so this first section of the book that's all kind of quaint and charming, it ends with the specter of World War I hanging over it. Can you talk a little bit about that, Sarah, and the significance?

SARAH: Sure. So, I mean, I think one thing that's interesting is that of course, World War I arrives in the novel and it's obviously this kind of cataclysmic event, but on the other hand, what's almost scary, especially to Laura when she's thinking about it, is how in some ways, or maybe for some people, it actually hardly changes anything. And it seems at first like the main kind of changes and opportunities for women in wartime are going to be for women a generation younger than her. So actually that would be women of Sylvia Townsend Warner's generation. And those women are kind of embodied by Laura's niece, Fancy, who marries at the start of the war to a soldier, then gets a job in a factory, then is widowed and ultimately leaves her young daughter in London to go and drive lorries in France, all of which is kind of totally incomprehensible to her mother, but sort of represents these new opportunities for women. Meanwhile, Laura is, you know, doing up parcels at some charity and basically kind of carrying on as normal. But she obviously has kind of noticed the changes for the younger generation and there has been some kind of subterranean change in her too that will become apparent not that long after the end of the war. And there's this moment when she's sort of watching Fancy's children on the beach, you know. Her niece now has two daughters of her own, and she sort of realizes that she's going to be called on to help raise that generation as well, you know. So this is a bit of a kind of escape or stay forever moment. And in terms of, you know, for Sylvia Townsend Warner, she was much younger than Laura when the war broke out. She was only 20. So in a way, it represents more opportunities for her. Um, and at first, you know, at her home, they only really feel the war in the way that all of her father's former students start, you know, disappearing and going to the front. And just really sad things like the school newspaper filling up with obituaries. But early on, Sylvia gets involved in kind of charitable efforts to help Belgian refugees, and then she moves away from home and works in munitions factory. So it kind of gives her this taste of freedom, but it's actually also, interestingly, the period where she comes closest to the kind of life that Laura Willowes lived, because it's during the war that her father dies unexpectedly. And that kind of leaves her in the position of being the kind of dutiful companion to her quite demanding widowed mother, but it is also the period when she decides that she's not going to tolerate that kind of life, and when Sylvia herself leaves for a job in London. More generally, it's maybe worth mentioning that the British suffrage movement, which, you know, had really been gaining ground before the outbreak of the war, uh, and the suffragettes famously kind of gave up their campaigning to work for the war effort. So on the one hand, it represents this kind of fallow period for women's cause, but it's also, there is this kind of real sense that it's their big chance to prove themselves. All of which is to say, you know, the First World War lasted from 1914 to 1918, hundreds of thousands of British men were killed, millions of people worldwide. So however people are affected personally, this is a huge trauma for British society that changed things in ways that perhaps weren't entirely clear at the time. And so from then on, you know, life is always going to be divided into before the war and after it. So, you know, it really makes sense as this kind of big dividing moment in the novel.

AMY: So, if Laura is trapped in Part 1 of the novel, Part 2 is all about her making her escape. She feels like she's being pulled towards something, she doesn't quite know what. And Townsend Warner writes, Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience. A something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet, in some way, congenial.

KIM: Yeah, she has this lightbulb moment. She's out on a secret expedition to buy flowers. (Her brother and sister in law judge her for buying fresh flowers; they think it's wildly extravagant.) Anyway, she's standing in the shop buying herself some chrysanthemums, and she has an almost out of body moment. She instantly knows she needs to move to the place where these flowers were grown, a village called Great Mop in the Chilterns.

AMY: So she goes home and announces this decision to the family, and they all think she's absolutely nuts. Her brother predicts that she is gonna go there and end up becoming the village witch, and she sighs and says, “How lovely.”

KIM: Right. More foreshadowing. Um, and then she also learns around this time that her brother who was acting as steward of her finances has mishandled her money and there's actually less to live on than she imagined, which is really infuriating, actually. Um, and she gives him a real piece of her mind. It's really an amazing scene.

SARAH: I think Sylvia Townsend Warner is so good at kind of using humor to depict the kind of ordinary, sort of non-ogre-like tyranny of people like Henry. 

KIM: Yes. 

SARAH: You know, she kind of exposes them for what they really are by not taking them as seriously as they take themselves, you And there's a great line where she says, Henry was kindly disposed to those who did not thwart him by word or deed.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And I love that scene too because Laura is just so calm throughout it. She's just sort of patiently sitting there like, Yes, tell me more. Tell me what you did with my money. And then he has to grudgingly admit he misspent it and she just sort of sighs and is like Well, okay but still got my plan and I'm going to do this anyway. It's a very empowered moment for her. I love it.

KIM: Yeah. Me too.

AMY: So I feel like once she finally moves, she gets to this new village, Great Mop, we start to see a shift in the tone of the book a little bit. It almost felt to me like a couple of types of books put together. It still has that quaintness, but there's a more allegorical feel to it, maybe. So she spends her early days there just sort of walking the hills, but she doesn't really quite know what to do. It's sort of like “wherever you go, there you are” kind of feeling. Um, she stumbles across an inn called The Reason Why.

KIM: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. And the villagers all seem a bit odd. It's almost like, is it going to be Wicker Man or something? Like this stuff going on? 

AMY: Just going to turn into a Stephen King novel, yeah. 

KIM: Exactly. she can't quite put her finger on what it is, but there's something a little mysterious, a little spooky about it all, um, that she finds herself absolutely in love with country living. The thing she's much more worried about is that her grown nephew, Titus, is going to pay her a visit. And then once he gets there, he decides he wants to stay with her and work on writing a book. It's a huge problem for her, right, Sarah?

SARAH: Yeah, it's a big problem. Um, partly because Titus is going to need taking care of basically, but also partly because Great Mop is her place, you know. It's somewhere that she's had all to herself, it's somewhere that she's finally found her independence. Part three opens with her in despair and rebellion, the novel says, because Titus turning up kind of threatens to put her right back into the kind of bondage that she's just escaped. And I think it's worth noting that Titus is actually her favorite member of the family. So it's not that she has a problem with Titus in particular, but it is really this thing that he intrudes on her peace. And, you know, there's a sense that this time her entrapment is going to be much worse because she's now had a taste of freedom, you know? She knows what it's like to not be beholden to anyone, to not have to kind of account for herself or anyone. And I think, you know, the obvious connection you can make with this novel is to Virginia Woolf's “A Room of One's Own,” which actually isn't published until a couple of years later, in which Woolf kind of recognizes that a woman writer needs financial independence, yes, but also privacy.

KIM: Yeah. And the entitlement that Titus has to just immediately begin asking for whatever he wants. And she's basically it's, it's her space, but also the servitude aspect of it.

AMY: Yeah, and feeling like she can't even escape him. She's like, “I'm gonna go for a walk,” and he's like, “I'll meet up with you!” It's like, no! This is the point in the podcast where I wish we didn't have to worry about music copyright infringement, because I would so want to...

play the opening bars of "Sympathy for the Devil" right now.

KIM: You can sing it. It's never stopped you before.

AMY: Um, but to quote Townsend Warner, She, Laura Willowes, in England in the year 1922 had entered into a compact with the devil. The compact was made and affirmed and sealed with the round red seal of her blood.

KIM: And this is where you want to cheer.

AMY: Yeah, 

KIM: Go for it.

AMY: So, the pact is sealed with her blood because she gets scratched by a kitten and this animal becomes her familiar. Long story short, we're not going to give anything else away here, but she embraces witchcraft and she ends up being able to solve the Titus problem by the end of the novel. So we're just going to leave it at that. But anyway, this whole Satan coming into the picture, it's quite the plot twist.

KIM: Ha! 

AMY: I thought it was funny, Sarah, reading your book, because you mention an anecdote about Townsend Warner having her own strategy for getting rid of unwanted guests.

SARAH: Yeah, I love this so much. Um, when she was living alone in London as a young woman, if she hadn't an unexpected visitor, she would put her hat on before she opened the front door so that she could seem as if she was about to go out, you know, if she didn't want to actually let them in and have to deal with them. And, you know, she did this to protect herself, really, from, you know, from the amount of time that visitors can take up when she wanted to be writing or working on something else, but also, I think, to protect herself from the kind of emotional and practical demands of other people, know, because she's particularly vulnerable to that as a young woman living on her own, and this is something that both Woolf and Townsend Warner are aware of, and that they're both protesting, I think, is that, you know, they're living in a society that relies on the idea of women as self sacrificing. You know, it's a society that teaches women that their purpose in life is basically catering to the needs of others, you know, ideally as wives and mothers, but, you know, as maiden aunts, if they can't manage that, and as you say, you know, as you mentioned in Lolly Willowes, Titus doesn't even warn Laura that he's coming, you know, it's actually his mother who kind of bothers to give her the warning and he, presumably, he doesn't think it's necessary because of this assumption that single women are always available, you know, and this is what Sylvia Townsend Warner was kind of battling against a little bit, um, because they don't have any men or children to attend to. And if you think of, you know, her brother Henry getting his hour to himself in his study every evening after dinner, which, you know, it gets described in the first part of the novel, you really see the injustice of that. And this, again, I think is one of the things that's so interesting about Lolly Willowes. And I talk about it a little bit in the book is that, you know, Laura doesn't turn to witchcraft to get her money back from Henry or to get revenge on him for losing it, or to become beautiful or make someone fall in love with her or anything like that. She does it when her space is invaded, you know. That's the crucial moment, the big threat to her way of life.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. So Lolly gives a dramatic speech while speaking to the devil and she compares all women to sticks of dynamite. Warner writes, Even if other people find them quite safe and usual and keep on poking with them, they know in their hearts, how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are. Even if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it's there ready.

AMY: Oh, it's such a great speech. It takes up a few pages, right? But she goes on to say, That's why we become witches, to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. One doesn't become a witch to go run around being harmful or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It's to escape all that, to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others. So, Sarah, that goes back to what you were just saying. And we talked before about Lolly being disinterested in male suitors in this book. Do you think there's any queer subtext here? I mean, didn't realize until after I read the book that Sylvia Townsend Warner had a long term relationship with a woman.

SARAH: Yeah. I mean. I keep talking about Virginia Woolf, but there is this story about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner meeting at a lunch after the book was published and Woolf supposedly asked Sylvia how she knew so much about witches and Sylvia told her it was because she was one. Um, you know, and if anyone is going to pick up on queer subtext, I think Virginia Woolf would be the person to do it. But as you say, the love of Sylvia Townsend Warner's life was a poet called Valentine Ackland and her given name was Molly,, who she fell in love with, actually, a few years after Lolly Willowes was published in 1930. And they remained together until Valentine's death in 1969, and there was really never any doubt for either of them, I think, about the significance of that relationship. And they kind of explicitly referred to it or regarded it from early on as a marriage, even though obviously under British law, they weren't, you know, afforded the same recognition as a heterosexual couple would have been.

KIM: So when Lolly talks in her speech about not wanting to take the safe route, Sarah, does that tie into the decisions Townsend Warner makes later in life politically? What were some of the other ways Sylvia was defying convention and living dangerously, so to speak?

SARAH: Oh, there are so many ways. Um, I mean, I think Sylvia Townsend Warner was someone who was very comfortable living on the margins. And I don't mean that she didn't want to have influence or power, because I think she did. And I think she wanted to get attention for her ideas and her causes. I mean that she had, you know, she really had no interest in conventional respectability, you know. As we've talked about from early on, she was much more intellectual than the usual kind of young lady of her class and of most men, to be honest. After her father died, she refused to be the kind of dutiful maiden daughter and she went to London. She had a job, you know. For most of her adult life, she was supporting herself through her writing, although she did have a small inheritance. Um, but, you know, as you say, the key thing is her politics, which is actually something that is also very much part of her relationship with Valentine, who is the person who encourages her in the 1930s to take a more kind of organized approach to her convictions. Because, you know, Sylvia Townsend Warner, she wasn't just outraged by the inequalities of gender, but also of class and of race and of those caused by imperialism, for example. And all this kind of stuff really comes to a head for her in the 30s. That was a time in Britain, and obviously in the US as well, of real kind of social and economic turbulence. And it was also the period when fascism was kind of on the rise in Europe, and Valentine and Sylvia were paying really close attention to what was going on then. And their kind of big decision in the mid 1930s was that they joined the Communist party. And this actually, you know, it wasn't that uncommon among intellectuals of that era to be sort of enthusiastic about Communism. You know, they had this kind of, in some ways, very inspiring example of the Soviet Union. This is before Stalin's purges, or at least before, you know, the Great Terror is really known about outside of Russia. Um, but obviously it was still an extremely radical and very kind of suspect decision for most people in mainstream society. It's not a kind of secret decision. They're not kind of silent members of the Communist party. You know, they're very active. They do things like make posters. They attend meetings. They sort of arranged to ferry their neighbors to polling stations when there are elections to make sure that they can vote. They kind of use their personal book collection as a kind of lending library to help sort of convert the people who lived around them in their village. And because the party is so small, and actually because, you know, a lot of the famous male writers who get enticed to join the party prefer to play a more kind of symbolic role, they actually kind of managed to establish a fair amount of influence within the party. On the one hand, Sylvia and Valentine are these sort of two middle aged ladies living in sort of rural isolation in Dorset, you know, like what could be more harmless than them? But on the other hand, you know, it's a queer communist household that by this time is under police surveillance.

AMY: And actually, didn't the Nazis have a list of British citizens that they were going to go after the moment they invaded? And she was on the list.

SARAH: I mean, they're very public, kind of anti fascist. intellectuals. So yeah, I mean, absolutely. They would have been at terrible risk if the Germans had invaded.

KIM: So, thinking of the description of Lolly's brother and sister in law in the book, it seems like Townsend Warner had a real disdain for people who lived in a bubble and were oblivious to those real pressing issues of the day that she obviously cared deeply about.

SARAH: Yeah. And I think that's a really large part of what her campaigning during the 1930s is about, you know. It's about getting people to sort of wake up from their complacency and to see that what's happening in Germany or in Italy, you know, or in Spain can have a real relevance. You know, she sees her fiction as something that can be deployed to help persuade people, you know, to help them kind of imagine their way into these other lives. And you know, I think both of them, she and Valentine, were really aware that the kind of life that they were leading, you know, which requires freedom to write what you want, to love who you love, you know, to not be reduced to your gender. That that kind of life wouldn't be possible for them in a fascist country, you know. So I think that is , partly what galvanizes them when the Spanish Civil War comes along. And there's this tragic, but brilliant letter that Valentine writes in 1936 where she says, you know, she's expecting a war to come and she's not optimistic that either of them would survive if it came, you know, but they use that fear to sort of power their activism. You know that they're not kind of overcome by it.

AMY: And I thought there was a really interesting line from your book, Sarah, that seems suited to Lolly Willowes. You write that "Sylvia played up a nothing to see here persona in much of her writing, letting what was radical infiltrate beneath A comforting sense of eccentricity." That really caught my eye. I think it's a perfect description of the tone of Lolly Willowes, with the sort of radicalness hiding underneath. All that, you know, pastoral imagery and it's like she pulls a bait and switch on the reader, almost.

SARAH: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I read Lolly Willowes in a way, as a reminder not to underestimate women like Laura Willowes, you know. It's a reminder that behind every maiden aunt there's an individual with a mind and desires and opinions. Of course, this is what gives Satan his edge in the novel isn't it? You know, that he not only notices these women who are so used to being overlooked, but he actually goes to the trouble of pursuing them.

KIM: Right. Right.

SARAH: You know, as you say, Sylvia Townsend Warner is so kind of skilled at enticing her reader rather than confronting them, It's not a kind of Disneyfied version of witchcraft,, you know. Laura's not kind of like a cuddly old lady with a broomstick who's, you know, taking the local children flying or whatever. She's, I mean, not to give too much away, but she very explicitly sells her soul to the devil, which, you know, is pretty shocking, right? But Warner has kind of readied the ground for this with her humor and by making Laura seem so kind of gentle and eccentric. A lot of her point in the novel comes across quite gradually. She sort of builds up slowly to this cri de coeur at the end of the novel, because, it's only as Laura gets happier at Great Mop that she realizes how unhappy she was before in her previous life. And there's this brilliant passage where, you know, she says Laura doesn't blame the family for her unhappiness, because she sees that they're the product as well of their time in society. And she writes, If she were to start forgiving, she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt Salome and her prayer book, the Bank of England, prostitution, the architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilization, you know, i. e. there is this enormous edifice that is supporting conventionality and that's kind of holding women back. And I think, you know, the fact that Laura makes this extreme decision of selling her soul to the devil highlights how few options that women have in that world. The point is that Laura kind of sees everything that the kind of respectable bourgeois life offers a woman like her, and she sees that there's not enough in it for her.

AMY: It's almost like the end of the book becomes a manifesto, you know?

KIM: Definitely. Um, what was the reception to the book, when it was published? Were people shocked by this?

SARAH: Well, it was very well received. Um, there were lots of reviews that were very positive. It sold very well. It was probably her best selling novel during her lifetime. And it, you know, really helped with her not very big income at the time. But it doesn't really seem to have been the kind of reception that she was hoping for. Um, so she wrote to one friend quite early on saying that people were calling the novel “charming” and “distinguished,” and that was making her heart sink lower and lower.

KIM: Yeah, it's like, did they finish it?

SARAH: Exactly. But it's all, you know, it's, it's kind of the, you know, she has this skill at lulling her readers into a full sense of security and she almost does that too well, you know, and they kind of overlook some of the more provocative points that she's making. And I think it's quite notable that, you know, her subsequent novels are a lot more kind of explicit in their messaging.

AMY: That's funny. She's like, “Yeah, we're going to have to bring the hammer down now on the future books.” That's funny. Are there any other themes of this novel that you think we ought to discuss? Anything else relating to the book that we didn't touch upon?

SARAH: Um, I mean, I think time is a really important aspect of this novel, and I love the way that the novel kind of uses it. And I think that sort of also connects to another theme, which is, you know, the sort of difference between urban and rural life. Townsend Warner dedicates several pages to the sort of unchanging daily routine of Henry's house. And yet 15 years pass in a sentence, you know. And I think that's sort of maybe a comment or, you know, even a demonstration of how time can really lag for women in the short term when they're bound to this kind of domestic life. But it also passes so fast when they've got nothing to show for all these years, you know. And Laura in London always seems to be kind of busy with things that she doesn't think are important, like, you know, cleaning out the canary cage, as you said. And that's something to do with being in London as well, you know. She really loses control of her time and therefore she kind of loses the pleasures of idleness. And Warner writes, Even Laura, introduced as a sort of extra wheel, soon found herself part of the mechanism, and into working with the other wheels went round as busily as they. And that I think is also, you know, it's sort of about rural life and the values and the pace of rural life kind of coming up against the city and the demands of, you know, of capitalism, basically, for efficiency and quantifiable productiveness. And how that's sort of an anathema to the way that Laura would naturally kind of move through the world.

AMY: Yeah, she has that whole segue about the train coming to London with the cabbages on it, you know, and, and, and her brother and sister in law having no clue where the cabbages come from sort of thing. Definitely. Something she's interested in. Um, given how popular this book was at the time, I don't think it's ever been made into a film. Correct me if I'm wrong there. But hearing that Greta Gerwig is a fan of this novel gives me a lot more hope. I mean, can you imagine? And honestly, I was, I was thinking about it and I'm like, maybe the Barbie movie is sort of doing a similar thing, you know? 

KIM: Oh, yeah, I can see that. 

AMY: Some radical ideas hidden under all the pink. That's kind of what Sylvia was doing.

KIM: I like that idea. That's great.

AMY: Uh, so yeah, Greta, if you're out there, or maybe somebody British, this is such a quintessentially British book that maybe it has to be a British director.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

SARAH: I think Olivia Colman would make an excellent Lolly Willowes.

KIM: Oh my god. Absolutely. She's so great. 

AMY: Yes, perfect casting, yes.

KIM: She would be fantastic. So Sylvia Townsend Warner would go on to write six other novels, a handful of short stories, collections of poetry, a biography of T. S. White. Is there any book you would recommend that we read next in our discovery of her works? Are there titles you particularly love that you want to recommend?

SARAH: I'm obviously quite biased, but I would wave the flag for the novel that was inspired by her time in Spain, which is After the Death of Don Juan, which is really actually one of her most overlooked titles, but it's a great example of how freely she switched between comedy and tragedy, and how often she deployed comedy in quite kind of sly ways to express her outrage. And it also sort of features the devil as well, so another Lolly Willowes connection.

KIM: Great. 

AMY: Yeah, and I just saw Oppenheimer this weekend, so I feel like your book is actually very good in helping explain... I get so confused about the Spanish Civil War, you know, when it, when time goes by, I kind of forget it all because it's like, Which side's the good side, which side's the bad side. So your book does a really good job of explaining all that, but also kind of explaining, you know, people involved in communism at the time, all of the political underpinnings that now we're a little confused by. I felt like your book really did a great job of helping me understand it all. So thanks for writing it. And also I wanted to say your book really interested me and some other writers that I didn't know about, including Josephine Herbst. So we're going to add her to the list for a future episode, I think.

SARAH: Yay, that's great.

AMY: Thanks so much for joining us to talk about Sylvia Townsend Warner. This was so much fun.

SARAH: Thank you for having me. It was great.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Join us on our Facebook forum to learn more about this episode and see behind the scenes clips.

AMY: And we will see you next week. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.