Lolly Willowes: The 100-Year-Old Witch Story With a Very Modern Message

On one level, "Lolly Willowes", which celebrates its 100th birthday this year, is about a woman who turns into a witch. On another, it’s a rallying cry for female independence – and one of the maddest and most deliciously satisfying books I have read. 

The heroine of this debut novel, by British author Sylvia Townsend Warner, spends 20 years living with her brother and his awful wife in London, bringing up her nieces and nephews. One day she goes out to buy flowers – her one indulgence – and, breathing in their scent, is seized by the strong desire to  escape her stifling, dutiful life by moving to the countryside. She buys a guidebook and settles on the (sadly fictional) village of Great Mop, announcing her plans to the shocked family that evening. 

While out walking near the village one day, she enters a mysterious pact with a huntsman who she later decides must be the devil, returns home to her cottage to find a black cat has taken up residence there, and realizes she has sold her soul and become a witch. Soon, she discovers that Great Mop is full of witches. Becoming one is the price of her independence — a price she's more than willing to pay.

The novel is properly funny. Think "A Room of One's Own" (Townsend Warner was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf), but bitingly satirical. Both were written in the shadow of the First World War, when British women had been given a taste of independence and a chance to do meaningful work, only to have that taken away when the men returned. And because so many men did not return, marriage was far less likely. Many women, like Lolly, had to rely on the charity of relatives and faced pressure to accept any suitor that came their way, however undesirable.  

Lolly flees to Great Mop to escape her nightmare relatives, but at first she's not entirely successful. Her nephew Titus follows her there, becoming increasingly demanding of his aunt's time, until she makes her pact with the devil. After that, his milk mysteriously turns sour repeatedly — something he attributes to "popular education, and the spread of science among dairy farmers." Mice keep him awake gnawing at his bed, and he falls into a wasps' nest while out walking. He’s rescued from the wasps by a young woman who’s visiting from London, instantly proposes marriage, and leaves with her. Lolly ends up not just with a room of her own, but a whole village, free of the relatives who had sought to tie her down.

The message is clear. At the pivotal point when she's making her pact with the huntsman/devil, Lolly remembers hearing that it's possible to poke a fire with a stick of dynamite and not set it off. "Even if it isn't true of dynamite, it's true of women," she tells him. "Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual and go 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." 

A century after this strange and wonderful novel first came out, it's a message that still rings true.