Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. I don’t want to say what I did get, because even though the clues are there, it’s best to come upon it, as the title character does, with an anticipation of autumn, by an old warehouse, or in a clearing, or in the woods, or near a Folly. Like this: One has to offer marriage to a young woman who has picked dead wasps out of one's armpit. With traces of her radical politics (STW was an active member of the Communist Party), of possible queer desire, and the underpinning of a need, however gently expressed in Lolly/Laura, to decide what her own life should look like, this is a subversive narrative - and a sparkling, funny one.

Part II ends when Lolly’s enjoyment of her new freedom is threatened by her nephew Titus’ announced plans to move to Great Mop because he’s entranced by its bucolic ways. After twenty years of being a live-in aunt Laura finds herself feeling increasingly stifled both by her obligations to the family and by living in London.One of Warner’s better tricks is that you can’t really be sure if she’s introduced a supernatural element or not. At these times she was subject to a peculiar kind of day-dreaming, so vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace.

Women, says Lolly to the devil, "know they are dynamite" and simply long for "the concussion that may justify them". You see, it's a matter of dilution, and not much can be done if a work runs headlong into losing itself in the crowd. That desire for more independence eventually comes into its own, and from that moment this novel becomes an early anthem to feminism. 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.

Suddenly Part 2 sets off in an unforeseen direction as Laura announces she will be moving to the isolated rural village that is the subject of her new book. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. I grew up in a household defined by all three of these things, in a state that was defined by their opposites.

After her father’s death, Laura’s caretaker role is shifted from dutiful daughter to irreplaceable aunt.Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916.

But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her. The spent gusts left the beech-hangers throbbing like sea caverns through which the wave had passed; the fir plantation seemed to chant some never-ending rune. To Laura, even if she had to sell her soul to the devil so she could live in peace, she would do it.

The first thing I read of Warner was her collection of fairy stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and that’s because I kept coming across references to her work in compendia of fantastic places. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I’ll go to my grave now,” and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her. It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. As the jacket says, "an upper-class spinster rebels against her role as the universal aunt" and how does she do this?