
I have known about this novel for a very long time - I think I may have heard of it first through Simon, who wrote about it in his D.Phil and has mentioned it many times on his blog. But somehow I never got around to reading it. So what better novel to read for Helen's Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week? And yes, I can see why it is so highly regarded, though it surprised me very much because I was anticipating one kind of novel - lady becomes a witch - and though this does happen, it happens very late on in what until then has been the story of an ordinary single woman who has been forced the make her home with her family. And it happens in a most unusual way, not at how I'd imagined.
Laura Willowes is twenty-eight when her father dies. She has no choice but to accept the offer of a roof over her head from her brother and sister-in-law, who, though not exactly rich, live in considerable comfort. Laura is 'absorbed into the family like a piece of family property forgotten in the will'. She is given the use of the second best spare room, and treated with kindness, though she never feels she belongs. The family is an unremarkable one:
Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors. Observing those canons no member of the Willowes family had risen to much eminence.
In this dull household Laura becomes indispensable, though her duties are few. She is much loved by the children, who call her Aunt Lolly. The years go by and she fades into middle age, vaguely dissatisfied but lacking any direction for change. Her only small rebellion is her habit of filling her small room with beautiful hothouse flowers, something regarded with amused acceptance by her family. Laura is filled with cravings, though for what she can't say:
Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at in the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness - these were the things that called her away from the comfortable fireside.
One day, in a flower shop, she is overwhelmed by the beauty of some red chrysanthemums, and an idea comes into her head. What she really craves for is to be on her own in the countryside - to be 'standing alone in a darkening orchard'. As she reflects to herself, 'It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of one's possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies'. And so it is that, much to the shock and disapproval of her relatives, she ends up in a small village called Great Mop. Her brother has invested her small capital badly, so she can't afford to buy a cottage, but she finds a congenial landlady who rents her a pleasant room in her comfortable house. And so begins her new life, with solitary walk in the fields and woods, and a much greater sense of contentment than she ever had in London.
She was changed and she knew it. She was humbler and more simple. She ceased to triumph over her tyrants, and rallied herself no longer with the consciousness that she had outraged them by coming to live at Great Mop. The amusement she had drawn from their disapproval was a slavish remnant, a derisive dance on the north bank of the Ohio. There was no question of forgiving them, She had not, in any case a forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by them. 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 civilisation.
And then one night she finds herself at an event which she soon realises is a witches' sabbath. Practically all the women from the village are there and Laura finds herself caught up in the general rejoicing and frenzied dancing. And it's there that she encounters the only male present, who she soon recognises as Satan. But this is not Satan as we have been taught to imagine him - she calls him a 'loving huntsman' who, as Sarah Waters puts it in her excellent introduction to the Virago edition, 'pays [women] the compliment of pursuing them and then, having bagged them, performs the even more valuable service of leaving them alone'. Towards the end of the novel Laura has a long conversation with Satan, in a field by a wood, and then, abruptly, he gets up and leaves. The sun is going down and Laura realises it is too late to get home - she will sleep out for the first time in her life, under the stars. She's happy at the disappearing day and the parting of her new friend, 'pleased to be left by herself, left to enter this new independence acknowledged by their departure'.
This is a truly wonderful book and Warner is an exceptional writer. The novel, her first, was a critical success, though Warner was saddened that people viewed it as simply charming whimsy:
they told me that it was charming, that it was distinguished, and my mother said it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And my heart sank lower and lower; I felt as though I had tried to make a sword, only to be told what a pretty pattern there was on the blade.
For more reviews and links, head over the A Gallimaufry where new reviews will be popping up all week.