Lolly Willowes

By Sylvia Townsend Warner
Introduction by Alison Lurie

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.

Reviews

Sylvia Townsend Warner had a connoisseur's eye for the bogus, and a hatred of the assumptions of privilege. Her heart was with the hunted, always... Along with an extraordinary fancy she had a deep understanding of human behavior, so that nothing, no feeling, seemed to lie beyond the reach of her imagination...She had the true novelist's awareness of the wheel (the image is hers) turning and turning in "the bright implacable river" of life.
— William Maxwell

Also see:

Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The Salutation By Sylvia Townsend Warner Introduction by Adam Mars-Jones Mr. Fortune's Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner's second novel, is lyrical, droll, and deeply affecting, and her missionary captivated his creator as much as he did her readers.

Improbable Heroes & Heroines Collection The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, The Slaves of Solitude, and Lolly Willowes

Summer Will Show By Sylvia Townsend Warner Introduction by Claire Harman Townsend Warner brings 19th-century Paris to pungent life in this thrilling novel of a proper Victorian aristocrat's political and emotional awakening among the barricades. "Her best book."—Sarah Waters

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