Backlisted - Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Episode Date: March 6, 2016

Sylvia Townsend Warner's debut novel 'Lolly Willowes' is the main book under discussion in this episode. It's nominated by journalist, author & playwright Samantha Ellis, and she discusses witchcraft, spinsters and the Chilterns with John, Andy and Mathew. Also touched on: epic poetry on Dartmoor in the rain, and J.B. Priestley's influence on David Bowie. Timings:3'41 Snowy Tower by Martin Shaw 11'23 - English Journey by J B Priestly / The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford 20'51 - Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ryland. Ryland. That's right. The life of Ryland. That's right. The life of Ryland. Yeah. Good.

See what they did. Yeah. Wasn't that Alan Carr at SME or something? What was that? Yeah, I can't remember. But yeah, we had Alan Carr. We had Zadie Smith. Carr Crash.

We had Zadie Smith. We had Jamie Oliver. It was a kind of, it was a, yeah, a kind of a Salmagundi of modern publishing genius. What? A what? Look it up, kids. Salma Gundi is a kind of a...

It's like a, you know, it's like a sort of a dish with all sorts of different ingredients in it. Wow, is it? Yeah. I've learned something already. We haven't even started. There was a very famous highbrow American journal called Salma Gundi. That's the only reason.

But Susan Sontag used to contribute too. Very highbrow. Always reminds me of that great joke of Woody Allen's where he said, you know, dissent and commentary. I have this fantasy that the two of them will merge and form dysentery. But, yeah, it was good. I mean, it was amazing. It's publishing, traditional publishing as we like to call it,

at the top of its game. But none the more. Where was it? None the less fun for that. Where was it? It was in a ghastly hotel on the outskirts. Well, it's supposedly in Birmingham. I'm doing cats.

Yeah. I saw a photo on Twitter of a conference. But the logistics is vast now. I mean, hundreds of, I think it's 1,000 people. They don't all fit in one room. And we had to do our presentation. Seriously? Yeah.

Wow. We had to do our presentation twice. Once at the, what seemed to me, rather early time of 10 in the morning. First house and second house. Exactly. We were much better in the afternoon, Matthew. Yeah, we were. I don't know why that was, John.

Everyone had been drinking, hadn't they, by then? Or had time to recover from the previous night's drinking, perhaps more to the point. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. As usual, we're gathered around the kitchen table of our lovely sponsors Unbound. You know them. They're the publishers who bring authors and readers together on a lovely website. And I'm John Mitchinson, publisher at Unbound, so i would say that about them wouldn't i he's so slick now he's slick and i'm andy miller uh i'm the author of the year of reading dangerously and uh we're joined on the podcast uh by our producer matt who's pointing

he's saying i'm supposed to say by playwright journalist and, who is pointing. He's saying, I'm supposed to say, by playwright, journalist and author, Samantha Ellis, who's not... You were going to say. Go on, you go, then. You read off the... Actually, you do this bit of the script. All right.

Excellent. Maybe we should have printed two scripts off. Yeah. How come he gets the scripts and I don't? I'm John Manchester. I'm John... I'm John Midgerton. Publisher of Unbound. I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of The. I'm John Midsom. I'm John Midsom. Publish what I'm about.

I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And we are joined, as usual, by the writer and shaman, Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew. Hello, Andy. Hello. And we're also joined by... We're joined today by the playwright and journalist, Samantha Ellis,

whose book, How To Be A Heron, was published to multiple and copious plaudits in 2014. Hello, Samantha. Hi, hi. Samantha has chosen the book we're going to be talking about in this show, Lolly Willows, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. But first, this is traditional. I'm going to get Andy to ask me. Yeah.

Hey, John, out of interest, what have you been reading? I'm obviously so pleased that you asked me that question and i've been reading an extraordinary book called snowy tower parsifal and the wet black branch of language by martin shaw and the first thing i'd have to say about it is i've said it's remarkable but the second thing i'd have to say about it's not published in the uk but i think you can get it. It's published by White Cloud Press in Oregon in the United States. So I think it is possible for you to get it on limited edition. What's his name?

Martin Shaw. Would you describe him as a master storyteller? I would say he's a master of many things. He is definitely a great storyteller. And the book is about storytelling. The book is, in a way, a retelling and an opening up of the 13th century poem Parzival, which is one of the key elements of the Grail story, one of the key retellings of the Grail story. And obviously the basis of Wagner's opera, but also of much else.

By the Minnesinger, the German sort of troubadour, Wolfram von Eschenbach. I don't read medieval German. I don't need to in this book because Martin's version of the story is published in full at the back as an appendix. So you can read the story straight without anything else. But then what he does is he takes it apart. Is it fiction or nonfiction? No, no, it's totally nonfiction.

He's basically writing about storytelling and myth. Right. He's got a great thing. He is a teacher of myth. And in order to get closer to the deep roots of myth, he lives in Dartmoor. So that's one of the odd things about the book. Yeah. Martin Shaw himself is based here, but his work is published.

So how did you hear about it? I heard about it through the Dark Mountain Project, which is the brainchild of Paul Kingsnorth, who is the author of The Wake, one of Unbound's authors. Basically, Paul did an event with Martin in Edinburgh last year and Mark Rylance, who's bought the film rights to The Wake and reads brilliantly the... If you know, Paul's novel is written in a shadow shadow tongue halfway between Anglo-Saxon and modern English. And Rachel, my wife, was there looking

after all three of them and came back with Martin's book saying that it was a really remarkable, well she said two things, it was a really remarkable event and she said you ought to go off and spend four days fasting up the mountain with Martin Shaw, it would be good for you. Happy? No, but I really do want to. Can I read you just a little bit? Yeah, right.

Just to get you... She meant the other Martin Shaw. So let me give you a flavour of the book. I devoured this and I haven't read a book. It's kind of, you know, Robert Bly, that sort of thing. I mean, I think he writes wonderfully. To tell Parzival in a good way, I first took it back to the fireside for several years,

to wood smoke and low-bellied badgers, rustling beds of nettles and a hundred million stars overhead. Up on the lupine flank of Dartmoor, I once told the story for three days straight, eyes weeping from the wet kindling, great draperies of mist settling around our small gang, iron rain paddling our thin canvas shelter hanging from the oaks, the drops fierce thrumming around us.

It gave the story a chance to stretch its handsome bones on Devon soil to examine its frosty whiskers in the cool green reflection of a moorland lake. So, I'm totally, I'm in for this. So, in one word then, is it a hit or a myth? Oh, good. Thanks, thanks matt for bringing us dragging us back down to earth but it is it is it's a retelling of a story and i think a pretty

and i one of the reasons i was interested in it is his myth is kind of is about story and it's about imagination he kind of has a bit of a pot pot takes a bit of a pot shot at social media as a you know low-hanging fruit let's be honest but what he says is that we're adrift in an epidemic of the literal which i sort of know what he means and one of the problems is that we have a general sense of well there's two books out this week which i ought to like but i have slight problems with one is the book by charles foster which is called Being a Beast. Oh, yeah.

And the other one is called Goatman. And these are two books that come out more or less at the same time about people actually pretending to be animals. Now, I'm all for understanding animals, and we'll probably talk about a bit of this when we get on to Lolly Willows. But, you know, it's like you don't actually have to go and eat worms and live in the

garden you know it's about using your imagination and our inability now to use our imagination we sort of want we want everything to be fact-based we want everything yeah unless we can actually put the worm in our own mouth we we can't imagine what it's like to be a badger or what it's like to alan bennett tells a brilliant story but you remember the actor Michael Bryant who's no longer with us sadly Michael Bryant was a grand old man in the National Theatre and uh Alan Bennett scripted a revival of Toad of Toad Hall Wind in the Willows one of the features of this revival of Wind in the Willows is that the actors had were taken to uh mime and movement classes to teach them how to move like rats and moles and weasels and what have you. And Michael Bryant attended the first day in his role as Badger. And on the second day, he said he didn't attend.

And Alan Bannett rang up and he said, The thing is, Alan, I've discovered the most extraordinary thing. This Badger moves exactly like Michael Bryant. Well, that's absolutely perfect, because that's sort of what I... It's that stories are human things. We make stories. Kind of the core matter of human material is story. Like Martin Shaw's, my last bit on his website,

he says, the business of stories is not enchantment, it's not escape, the business of stories is about waking up and again this will be the theme of waking up and awakenings particularly the awakenings that have been kind of dislodged or made. So that's called Snowy Tower

It's called Snowy Tower, Parsifal and the Wet Black Branch of Language. Do you think it'll come out here? Well, I reveal my hand slightly. If I have anything to do about it, I'd really love us to do it, see if we can find a way of doing a UK version of it. It's remarkable, and it's not often that I read a book, as they say, in one sitting. But I did. I spent last Saturday Saturday reading and getting more and more excited.

I would also recommend just thinking about books about stories and how stories are constructed. I don't know if anyone here has read John York's book, Into the Woods, came out a couple of years ago. Oh, yeah. Wonderful, wonderful book. And he goes to the way that stories work and it's all, you know, you go into the woods to a new place

and you come back with something that makes your home good again or right again he did a talk for me in Brighton I asked him at the end of it I said what's the point of all this what's the point of knowing this and he said the point of knowing this is you realize the difference between truth and lies because when a story takes over it becomes lies and once you understand the structure of stories you can see the ways that people have played with what actually happened and turned it into something else. And as soon as you start reading newspapers through that prism, it completely changed the way that I looked at the news and the way

it's related to us. You suddenly see the way that they've been... How narrative is constructive. Yeah, how narrative has been constructive and used to bend stuff. God, this is also I feel Sylvia Townsend Warner just standing at the end of the street waving at us. Come on in. But before that, Andy, you have also been reading. You've been working your way through that Bowie list.

I have. We've picked this up a couple of times now, but I think I just want to, this is the last time I'll talk about it. But you recall last time, anyone who listened to the last podcast, I read Pakun because it was on David Bowie's list of 100 books. So since the last podcast, I've read a couple of more books from Bowie's list. I read English Journey by J.B. Priestley and The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford. And so I'll tell you a little bit about each of those. Basically, I really loved English Journey.

Isn't it great? God, what a fantastic book. Fantastic book. The subtitle, Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.

And it's fascinating to read it in comparison with Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which was written in the same period, which was commissioned by the same person. I think I'm right in saying, I think that's right. It could easily be. So priestly is more to the right than orwell and yet the thing that's wonderful about english journey is first of all the depiction of a country in which in 1933

he was traveling through the industrial north and was pretty horrified by what he found. Yeah. You know, he was saying, you know, this area of the country was despoiled and ruined and looted, and the money was rerouted to London to enrich the city, and the inhabitants were left to live amongst the slag heaps. Northern powerhouse.

So I found that absolutely fascinating. But also I really loved, the thing I loved about English Journey was the extent to which Priestley gets that balance exactly right. Which actually Orwell doesn't always, although Orwell was magnificent right, so we can appear magnificent, but

of being just the right amount of grumpy. And just grumpy enough to get away with telling you what he had for breakfast, whether it was any good or not. Because he never stays in that mode for too long. It reminded me of that book by Paul Theroux. Yeah, yeah, Kingdom by the Sea. Kingdom by the Sea, which is a wonderful book,

but is a slightly grimmer journey around the UK. I would assume that Bowie had read English Journey again relatively young, and I can see why it would stay with you as a depiction of parts of the country that didn't feel like a period piece either. I mean, in some respects, it clearly did. I mean, it's years since I read it, but I just remember, because I had a bit of a jag of reading a lot of those H.V. Morton in search of books, and the other one, H.J. Massingham,

who wrote a lot of the Batsford. And they're kind of, they are so addled by nostalgia for a kind of a lost Mary England that probably never really existed. Which also, which Priestley talks about specifically, saying the difference between merry England and quotes, unquotes, merry England, this thing which was already becoming a cliché in 1933 in terms of how it was represented in restaurants and advertising and what have you. And there was also a fantastic, if anybody follows me on Twitter,

I shan't read it out, but I tweeted a paragraph about Priestley defending multicultural Bradford. I did see that. Which is just the most brilliant, stirring thing that you could read. I can't remember, is it a Penguin Classic? Well, you know what, it's currently not in print in a paperback edition. So I bought the folio edition from the mid 90s i picked that up second hand for about a tenner and it's full of the incredible photographs which were researched for the

jubilee edition in the mid 80s where they've actually found the specific shops or mines or buildings that priestly writes about it's just I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a wonderful book. And the other one, then, The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford, a former star of Backlisted, Decker Mitford. I found American Way of Death, which is a book about... She's Commie Mitford, isn't she? Yeah, yeah, Commie Mitford, yeah. It's about the American funeral industry written in the early 1960s.

In one level, clearly very dated. I mean, it's like a fascinating mixture of investigative journalism written by a Mitford. It's a combination of Watchdog and You and Non-You. But knowing her background and her communism, as an analysis of American capitalism and how it feeds into social practice. It's still brilliant.

Brilliant book. And also the thing that's so fascinating about The American Way of Death is she had to persuade agent, publisher, everyone to take it on. And then even to her own surprise, it became a phenomenal bestseller wasn't it yeah it's one of the biggest selling books in america of the 1960s and it's the reason why i'd never been able to make this connection you know that tony richardson made a film of evelyn war's novel the loved one in the mid-1960s he's got a script by isherwood and terry southern you tweeted about this yeah it's it's shot by i can't remember his name Haskell Wexler

and it's not a great film even allowing for all those component parts but I couldn't understand why this film what a strange film to be made in the mid 60's and the reason it was made is because the American Way of Death had been such a best seller that they looked round and went

here's a film, what else have we got? That'll do. And so this crazy post-strangelove version of Evelyn Waugh gets made. Evelyn Waugh hated it, of course. The man, Evelyn Waugh. Is it available? Is it YouTubeable? I don't watch it.

It's around, yeah. You can see it. I must say it wore every minute of its two hours quite heavily. But, you know, it was nice to see it. But the general point I wanted to make was these are all books from a list, from somebody else's list. And I really like lists. I feel like the unwelcome cousin at the TLS dinner standing up and saying that because lists people

look down on list and they're seen as being reductive you know we're all supposed to be perfect readers who can trot easily from subject to subject and genre to genre has a perfect gift for you is lists of notes you can okay it's a beautiful illustrator in fact in the introduction to lists of notes, one of the things that Sean says is that human beings probably made lists before anything else, before they were sort of writing joined-up sentences. You can imagine it is that sort of the simplest possible way of ordering experience. You could also say that all stories are lists.

Stories are sort of things that are linked but in some sort of meaningful way. I had this great experience with the sight and sound list of the 100 greatest films, which was published, when was that, three or four years ago. So I looked at the sight and sound list of the 100 greatest films and I thought, OK, I've seen 33 of these films. Roughly the same score as you scored on the Boeing list i work in third i work in thirds imperfect thirds but i thought well i tell you what i'm going to do

i'm going to watch all of these films and what happened was at first uh it was like aversion therapy but actually it massively expanded my horizons in terms of what i thought about when i watched a film and what i expected from a film and what i understood about art house cinema and what it was trying to do it just seems a really democratic way of handling recommendation and i don't really understand why people get get uptight and snobby well i mean you know people do because they think it's some sort of it's cutting off other things you know all lists are kind of exclusion but that's you kind of can't as i confessed on the last podcast it's really hard to live without a list but the point is they're also it's laying out i mean i always think the oldest the most successful format of all desert island discs is

just a list of your of your favorite records anyone who doesn't make lists of things, that would seem to me to be a far more weird way of... I also think there's a sort of E.M. Forster-ish mistrust of the clerks improving themselves. That Leonard Bass thing about this guy should know his place and be

educated properly and not seek to be... All the earliest cunair form tablets, the earliest examples of writing that we had, were basically just, it was accounts. It was people writing, you know, other lists of ingredients or, you know, the king has ordered ten vats of beer. The Sumerians are very keen on beer. That's one of the many reasons I'm...

They're underrated as a civilisation. As an ancient culture. Yeah, as an ancient culture where do they come in your list of top 10 age uh well i mean of course the earliest work of literature that we have is the epic of gilgamesh i think we should work on a top 10 list of lists well the list of no is in fact a list of lists it's a it's a metalist and yet there's a list in there of galileo's shopping list of things i'll need to build my telescope. And there's also a Michelangelo shopping list where he's drawn pictures of apples and things that he needs to...

I'm quite surprised that the shopping lists of Sylvia Townsend Warner aren't available to peruse, given her mastery of every other form. You've hit on the slight snobby. I suppose you'd find Shakespeare's laundry list interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the answer's got to be, of course I would. Of course you would, yeah, absolutely. We'll be back in just a sec.

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Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by regency app for details. We're joined by Samantha Ellis, author of the book How to Be a Heroine. Samantha, I wanted you to come and talk to us about Lolly Willows by Sylvia Townsend Warner, because if it wasn't for you, I never would have read it it i read it last year and i was totally blown away by it because i read about it in your book could

you tell us a bit about your book so we can understand why you why you wanted to write about lolly willows yeah well so how to be a heroine came out of an argument that i had with my best friends um we were sort of making a pilgrimage up to top withins which may or may not have inspired wuthering heights probably not actually there's a sort of there's a plaque on it that basically says you've just come here for nothing you know it's a really the most kind of unromantic plaque you've ever seen but anyway we were making this pilgrimage and we started arguing about which heroine we like best jane eyre or Cathy Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights. And I was going, obviously Cathy.

I can't even believe Jane Eyre's part of this conversation. She's so boring, you know, and she's sort of smug and, you know, she doesn't really sort of do anything. You know, Cathy's all wild and passionate and she's sort of running in the rain and the winds and it was kind of quite wuthering, you know, as we up the hill and my friend my best friend emma said that you know kathy is really selfish and she's violent and she's a snob and she ruins everyone's lives she marries the wrong man and everyone's lives are ruined the man everyone else that all their lives

are all ruined by this and i started thinking OK, maybe she's got a point. My friend was going, she's clever, she doesn't care what anyone thinks. Then we got to the top of the slope and the sun came out and there was no more Wuthering and this plaque was going, you know, there's no romance here. And I thought, maybe I'll go home and I'll reread those two books and just see if I've always picked, I've sort of pretty much based my life on Wuthering Heights,

on Cathy in particular. I thought maybe this hasn't led me to be as happy as I possibly could be. And, you know, she ends up a restless ghost. Sorry, spoiler for Wuthering Heights, but she ends up a restless ghost. Jane Eyre, less unhappy at the end. I won't spoil that one. So anyway, I reread those two and then i just kept rereading and finding all these different heroines and one of the books i came to was

lolly willow's which one of the books i came back to was lolly willow's look at again now you've written how to be a heroine is what we could call a biblio memoir and i i the two have written well we wouldn't but people do but I too have written what is called People's Day Memoir of course you like lists

your bloody books yeah well you know I hadn't even occurred to me so carefully had you concealed I concealed that but

I want to ask you a question that you know did you ever think well why would people want to read me writing about books? Why wouldn't they just want to read the book?

No, it didn't occur to me at all. Me neither. First of all, can I just say the word BiblioMemoir, I had never heard it until someone said, you've written one. I literally heard it for the first time this afternoon. Well, good. I mean, it's such a weird word. Rick Joukowsky.

He coined it. He coined it. But, I mean, I never sat down. And secondly, did F.R. Leavis worry about writing about books? I mean, I'm not comparing us to... Yes, I am. I'm comparing us to F.R. Leavis. Yeah, we write to.

That's quite right. But also, no one asked him that question. The tradition of... I mean, I don't think we've written literary criticism, but the tradition of looking at literature and looking at characters and looking at stories and trying to work out how they relate to our own lives, we didn't, sadly, invent it, Andy.

I know, I know, it's funny, isn't it? I'd love to have invented something, but no. I also think, like... We're at the tail end of hundreds of years. If you wrote a book about a car, no one would say to you, why didn't you just go for a drive? I completely agree, or build a car.

I think that's absolutely, it seems to me totally valid that stories generate other stories, and both your books are actually books, they're not works of literary criticism. I mean, there are elements of that in it, but that's what I think gives them, dare I say it, the life the the life i mean you know andy from our days in waterstones there was only one shelf smaller than the literary criticism shelf i'm struggling to remember what that was now but yeah it was the slowest stock turn bit of indeed it was but not hardly surprisingly because who

wants to read a sort of you know know, dry academic dissertations on literature? readers that outside of the classroom and or outside of the the university campus and tries to put books onto buses or or book groups or places where we disagree or how we feel about them you know and the point is that requirement as you know the podcast study because people spend a lot of time asking people like me and you who do read a lot and whose sort of jobs have revolved around it what should i read yeah yeah and that anxiety is a real one so lolly willows by sylvia tanzan warner we do this on a backlisted i'm just going to read the synopsis on the back of my 1995 virago modern classic which is quite a lot longer than Yes. 2000 and 2006, 2012. Actually, I've just nicked Samantha's copy here, which is 2000.

The blurb gets shorter, edition to edition. But I'll just, so to give us the synopsis of the plot of Lolly Willows, so let's do that first, and then we'll talk a little bit about why you wanted to write about it. Lolly Willows is a 28 a 28 year old spinster when her adored father dies leaving her dependent upon her brothers and their wives after 20 years of self-effacement as a maiden aunt she decides to break free and moves to a small bedfordshire village actually i have to say it's a village in the chiltons uh bedfordshire is not specified here happy and unfet i'm just saying i'm some as i'm married to somebody from bedfordshire is not specified Here, happy and unfet

I'm just saying As I'm married to somebody from Bedfordshire I'm very Bedford aware Does Bedfordshire still exist? There goes our Bedford listener I always think of going up the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire Yes Oh, do you?

Anyway, Lolly Willow's. A little bit of childhood there, just thrown in for free. A small, arguably Bedfordshire village. Here, happy and unfettered, she enjoys her new existence, nagged only by the sense of a secret she has yet to discover. That secret and her vocation, and you may wish to switch off now, listeners, if you don't want to hear spoilers.

That secret and her vocation is witchcraft. And with her cat and a pact with the devil, Lolly Willows is finally free, an instant and great success on its publication in 1926. Lolly Willows is Sylvia Townsend Warner's most magical novel, deliciously wry and inviting. It was her piquant plea that single women

find liberty and civility and her pursuit of the theme Virginia Woolf later explored in A Room of One's Own. Now, I actually think that is a pretty great blurb. That's pretty good. Samantha, are those the reasons that you wanted to write about it in How to Be a Heroine? I was, well, I had found myself suddenly single

after one of the reviews of my book I was beginning what one of the critics of my book called My Loveless Thirties I would argue that the love of friends and family was very much part of the late part of my thirties. But anyway, I found myself single. And I just thought, where are the spinster heroines? I didn't want to be Miss Havisham,

sitting there in my mouldering wedding dress surrounded by the kind of mouldy cake covered in mice and spiders. I didn't want that. I went back to Persuasion. Anne Elliot is 27. And also, she's longing the whole time to be married. Cold Comfort Farm.

I love Flora Pace, but she's so cheerful, you know. Come on. I wasn't feeling that entirely the whole time, that cheerfulness. So then I found this book, Lolly Willows. And it's 1926 it's published. It's the heyday of the spinster novel because, sadly, there were loads of spinsters. They'd all lost their sweethearts in the war. And actually, Virginia Nicholson's book, Singled Out,

is really good on this because some women quietly moved in with their lovers. Here I am with my female friend. We just share a flat in Bloomsbury. Fine. It was actually, for some people, very liberating, but for some people it was sort of awful you know and there's some terribly sad books. I read this terribly

sad book called Consequences by E.M. Delafield and this woman sort of can't find love and she ends up a nun and she hates it and then she tries to stop being a nun and her teeth have all rotted for reasons that aren't even explained and she ends

I'm going to tell you, and she's single, yeah, it's true. We warned you. It's amazing what better dental health you have once in a relationship. And she ends up, I will spoil this for you, because it's just so bleak. She ends up putting stones in her pockets and going drowning herself in the ponds on Hampstead Heath

because she just cannot think of anything else to do. Is that the women's swimming pool? It's never specified. I mean, bless her. She doesn't even go for a swim. It's so awful. It's so awful. And that was 1919.

And then this book comes along and it's not like that at all. It's funny. It's subversive. And it has got a lot about the sort of grimness of being a maiden on. But then she finds a way out and it's not any of the ways

out that anyone would expect it to be i have to say i thought well i'll ask john what he thought in a sec but i i love the way that you think you'll read and this is a high risk strategy in a novel you think you're reading one book and then halfway through it becomes something totally different and unpredictable and then when you go back and read it again she seeded it all the way through there's a little bit i just want to read this just a few sentences very early on she would take the air in hyde park and watch the children on their ponies and the fashionable trim ladies in rotten row and go to the theater in a cab london life was very full and exciting there the shops, processions of the royal family and of the unemployed, the gold tunnel at Whiteley's, and the brilliance of the streets by night.

She thought of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed streets and squares, etc, etc. I mean, the two things to say about that are foreshadowing, metaphorically and literally, and the second thing is, how

beautifully written is that? I mean, just the little cavalcade of phrases there. It's beautiful. It's an astonishing, it's just beautifully written. Also I discovered it, she'd submitted her poetry of which more or none to the publisher

and he'd asked if she had anything else and she'd said well I've been fiddling around with this novel and perhaps you'd read it and sends it in and of course you know the editor falls on it. I mean it is one of the most beautifully written novels I've read in a very long time and I mean it has that incredible kind of um just keep your keep i see the hazard lights going off but you know without that it's it's to tell a story and the

story as you say it's such a brilliant story and so unexpected. As you say, it is suited. But when it finally goes, she has this epiphany off Moscow Road, a little kind of flower shop, where she has the epiphany about wanting to move to the country. And, God, it's just such a brilliant bit of writing. And also you would have to say that because this was her first novel, it's held together not by craft though there is craft in it but just her talent it's held together by her energy and her talent and this extraordinary

character uh lolly yeah laura willows who is yeah just one of the most remarkable characters i think i've read in in literature i mean you start off as a spinster but as you say she's totally in a way unbiddable she's sort of strangely disconnected from the family around her she goes along with she sort of plays a game she's a tomboy and she ends up sort of playing the game but then there's that fantastic moment when she suddenly decides no I'm going to do something different but she's or even before that, she's just deeply eccentric. Like Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Laura Willows is educated at home,

which means she isn't really educated, so she just has the run of the library. And she just doesn't really know how you're supposed to behave. And there's a wonderful moment where she gets set up with this boring lawyer called Mr Arbuthnot. And she says, I'm going to read it. Do I read it? Yeah, please.

Because it's so good. This is the last of many set-ups by her dreadful kind of brother. Boring, boring brother. And the wife is so boring at one point. That moment about the grave clothes folded in Jesus' tomb. She said, I really wish I hadn't done it. Laura says, how come your clothes are folded so neatly and she says well it's like the grave clothes

in Christ's tomb we always should emulate it and you just go wow such a brilliant moment. But this is Laura on a set up, not quite a date but a set up dinner. Her remarks were as a rule so disconnected from the conversation that no one paid much attention to them. Mr Arbuthnot

certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. It is, answered Laura, with almost violent agreement. If you are a werewolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February of all months is the month where you are most likely to go out on a dark, windy night and worry sheep. And you just think, he does not call again

one of the other things that's so wonderful about this book is she manages to do that thing again i think through force of personality really of telling you a story where you want you want to know what happens next okay well that's what you want from a novel but also being very thoughtful philosophically thoughtful and also being quite weird. And as we said, the novel takes a very peculiar twist at the halfway point, but also funny. I mean, it's so funny. It's so brilliantly turned in terms of phrase for phrase.

Matthew, did you get the thumbs up from Clayton? Well, the problem I had with it is it actually got a lot to do with the packaging of the book. So I had the edition that John's got, which it does look like a Jojo Moyes book. Yeah. It couldn't be further away from that. And nothing wrong with Jojo Moyes, but... We hasten to add. Yes, absolutely. It's not that kind of...

I wouldn't read a Jojo Moyes book, personally. And I picked it up and I started reading it and I just couldn't get into it at all. Because it's so different at the start from what happens later on. Yeah. So I kind of tried it because I've started it a month ago or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. I just couldn't get into it, couldn't get into it. And then I read a bit more about her and she sounded like an amazingly fascinating person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Read about the... A bit more about the book itself because, again, it's the weird thing of reading it on Kindle

is you see the cover but you don't read the blurb on the back. So all I knew about the book was literally the front cover of it. When I read a bit more of it, I was like, God, this is like a book totally written for me, a book about someone who moves to the country to become a witch. That's like my dream. You live in Lewes, don't you?

And you are a shaman. I am a shaman. Yeah, exactly. Shall I say a bit about Sylvia Townsend Warner? Would that be appropriate at this juncture? Most appropriate. So, actually, I'm going to lie to anybody. I am cribbing this out of the front of my edition of Molly Willow,

because it's so good. I'm going to add a couple of other things as we go along. Sylvia Townsend Warner, born in 1893, in Harrow, the daughter of George Townsend Warner, housemaster and head of the modern side of Harrow. As a student of music, she became interested in research in the music of the 15th and 16th centuries and spent ten years of her life

as one of the four editors of the ten-volume compilation Tudor Church Music. In 1925, she published her first book of verse. With the publication of the novels Lolly Willows in 1926, Mr Fortune's Maggot and The True Heart in the two following years, she achieved immediate recognition. One of the things we should say about Lolly Willows is that Lolly Willows, for its relative obscurity now,

was actually a huge critical and commercial success on publication. It was huge in the States. It was the first ever choice for the Book of the Month Club, which is the big American book club. So we should also say that she was a communist. She was a card-carrying communist. She witnessed the Spanish Civil War firsthand. She published seven novels, four volumes of poetry,

a volume of essays, eight volumes of short stories, a biography of T.H. White, much acclaimed, and a translation of Proust's Contre Saint-Berve. She lived most of her adult life with her close companion, Valentine Ackland, a lady, in Dorset, then in Norfolk, and again in Dorset, where she died on 1 May 1978 at the age of 84. Now, the one last point to make about Sylvia Townsend Warner's novels is actually I thought there is a real parallel with the author

who we did on the very first backlisted J.L. Carr, which is that no two of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novels are the same. They are fascinatingly different from one another, and I speak as someone who's read two of them in the last week in addition to lolly willows i will kind of want to come and talk about those in a little bit but the other bit about her biography that bit doesn't say but which i think sarah waters says in in the other edition yeah is that the reason she got the gig doing the four volume musical history was that she had an affair with the music teacher at Harrow

who was a lot older. Which is what actually this book comes out of. Yes, because she was having an affair with this married man and she was living in this sort of horrible kind of half-life. She didn't really have very much money. She was living on winkles and cigarettes and black coffee and scrambled eggs, apparently. That's your diet, isn't it?

And she was sort of not really, you know, when you're seeing a married man, you're not having a full, you know, she wasn't having a full life. And so she's writing about someone yearning for a full life. I think that's the sort of thing. So she never wrote an autobiography, even though she wrote in almost every other form, because she said she was too imaginative to write one.

And so she says she was born with a call which the midwife claimed and sold to a sailor she says that she read Mackay's Popular Delusions when she was a child and she used to say the spells to she used to say them to her cat hoping the cat would turn into a devil so this is in many ways

a dream come true for her that she is able to write about a sort of very devilish kitten that sets the whole witchcraft story off you know that's her as a kid on the stairs with her black cat willing it to become the devil you know she sort of makes a lot of her dreams come true and actually after writing lolly willows she sort of released herself into a much happier life with this poet, Valentine Ackland. And they were together 40 years.

And they lived a slightly kind of witchy kind of life in lots of ways. They used to sell chestnut jam and rhubarb chutney and nasturtium seeds, like to supplement her income from writing, even though she wrote all those books. But she was selling these sort of jams and chutneys in this village in Dorset. They became a pair of lolly willows and could you just we ought to say shouldn't we that the metaphor of witchery in the second half of the book is very self-consciously feminist yes right so they're sort of outlaws the witches and she talks about women all over all over europe unregarded as blackberries just springing up all over the place

oh it's beautiful isn't it and this idea there's just a sort of profusion of it and the sort of deliciousness almost of it but the sort of you wouldn't notice them you know the sort of prickliness the brambliness and there's that phrase isn't there she says that one becomes a witch not to do mischief or harm people but to quote to quote, to have a life of one's own. A life of one's own. This is Virginia Woolf, isn't it? It's pre-, before Room of One's Own. And the idea of a life of one's own, I think, is sort of bigger, isn't it?

She's wanting to sort of break out of, you know, being a, as herself, being a mistress and sort of, you know, I'm sure she enjoyed writing about Tudor church music, but, you know, she releases herself into a bigger life, I think. I love it. She says, in places like Bedfordshire, this is the long speech that she gives. Are we allowed to say who she gives the speech to?

Maybe we should keep a little bit back, but a rather startling character who takes over the sort of the last third of the book. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members and blacksmiths and small farmers and puritans in places like bedfordshire the sort of country one sees from the train you know well there they were there they are child rearing housekeeping hanging washed dishcloths on current bushes and for diversion each other's silly conversation and listening to men talking

together in the way that men talk and women listen quite different to the way women talk and men listen if they listen at all and there's just that sense of a kind of this eruption of uh of extraordinary female energy that you know that the kind of routine and having to there's a brilliant i thought it was one of the best the there was so much to do in the house when she was living in the house with her tedious brother and his wife. There was so much to do to fill the day. And she writes brilliantly about the servants. And I think there's a maid that goes into the room and she looks out on the day with no sense of surprise because she had obviously she'd been up since dawn, you know. But there's also there's a moment where she decides to.

So she comes home. She's 47. She's been sort of living with her family for 19 years, and then she sort of comes home and says, actually, I'm going to move to Great Mop, and it's a village in the Chilterns, and she keeps saying the population, I think it's 227, she keeps going, pop 227, and they keep going, what are you talking about?

You know, oh, Lolly, what are you talking about? And, you know, they think she's gone nuts. And then she says to her brother, well, I mean, I've got an income. You know, she has an income, and he goes, oh, well, you know, they think she's gone nuts. And then she says to her brother, well, I mean, I've got an income. You know, she has an income. And he goes, oh, well, you know, I can't allow it, I can't allow it. And then he sort of goes, actually, I've lost most of it. I've invested it. And he tries to bluster his way through.

He goes, well, these dividends don't always, you know, you've lost it. You've lost the system. You were supposed to safeguard it. She didn't know what she was doing with it. And you were supposed to look after it. And you've lost it. And she goes, well it she didn't know what she was doing with it and you were supposed to look after it and you've lost it and she goes well i won't be able to get a thatch cottage and i won't be able to get a donkey but i can still go and she goes but it's this extraordinary kind of the sort of the the sort of resistance of the sort of financial power that they've had a control they've had over her just by having her to live in their

their smaller spare room not their largest you know i i loved i so i found that reading of the book really really interesting but the thing i found when i read it last year after you recommended it to me that really struck me is the way that the novel starts off as a kind of edward, almost an Edwardian comedy of manners, and then morphs into this peculiar Arthur Macon. Yeah, yeah. Arthur Macon, author of The Great God Pan. Yeah. It's this strange, it's like a Beryl Cook pagan ceremony.

It's sort of illustrated by Stanley Spencer. Yeah, yeah. But also, I was really struck by that. Do you remember the Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter in Wind in the Willows? Yes, absolutely. That's very of its time. And at the same time, Macon was her brother-in-law.

Yeah, and she was friends with the Powers brothers as well. So there was this sort of... I mean, what I love about it, though, is that as somebody who's moved out of London to live in a village, she's so brilliant at capturing this sort of, she doesn't really want to get on with the villages at all. That's really true. Yes, that's very funny.

She doesn't sort of throw herself into village activities, but she kind of... She makes scones, doesn't she, in shapes of the villagers, and they go a bit wrong. And then one of them comes round and Mr Saunter ate the strange shapes without comment, quietly splitting open the villagers and buttering them. But she notices they're all a bit odd. Everyone in the village is a bit odd.

She doesn't know why. And this is sort of the start of her sort of investigation. Tell us about the thing with the cat. Oh, yeah. The cat finds her, right finds her well so she's got this village and she's having a lovely time and then her mrs leek her living in mrs leek's house as a lodger yeah the landlady who makes a quite sort of dandelion cow slip wine and stuff

and it's a bit of a character because she's always wanted to make things she's always since her nanny told her about mugwort and yeah she always wanted to make decoctions and tinctures of strange hedgerow plants. Yes, so she's there, she's having this sort of time. And then her dreadful nephew turns up. And I was going to say, in all books of this period, sorry to all the men around this table, but if a man writes, he's definitely bad news. All the men who write are really bad news.

Can confirm. You're all lovely but titus he turns up titus willows turns up and he's a fat lordly child and now he's a sort of annoying graduate yeah so he wants to write this book he wants to write this book and you know he turns up and goes oh this looks like a brilliant writer's retreat i shall stay here with my arms and she's just manspreading it's a brilliant writer's retreat. I shall stay here with my aunt. Manspreading. It's a brilliant bit of manspreading. It's awful. And she's sort of thinking, I wish he'd go away, I wish he'd go away. And this kitten turns up, just as she's been saying to the woods, how can I make him go?

And this kitten turns up and I don't think we should spoil everything, but saves her, really. The kitten's called Vinegar. She calls the kitten Vinegar. And one of the things... Vicious. Yes, one of the things she's able to do is, she doesn't do anything terrible to Titus,

but one of the things she does, which stops him really writing his book, is she sours his milk, just daily. Yeah, yeah. You can't write with sours. Yeah, yeah. How can you write that way? You can't make any tea.

I love... We're doing passages i love this is earlier in the book at her father's gravesite and it's like one of the first intimations that you get that she's i mean she's not interested in religion but i just this is the bees drowned in the motionless lime trees a hot ginny churchyard smell detached itself in a leisurely way from the evergreens when the mourners brushed by them the sun but an hour or so declined shone with an ardent and steadfast interest upon the little group in the midst of life we are in death said mr warbury his voice sounding rather shameless taken out of church and displayed upon the basking echo-less air in the midst of death

we're in life, Laura thought, would be a more accurate expression of the moment. It's just brilliant. I love the way the vicar's voice sounds sort of shameless outdoors, you know, not that church of England kind of drone. But as you say, seeded through the book, the rebellion when it comes ought to be ridiculous and it ought not to work at all.

But it's one of the most... I just thought it was one of the... The scene where she comes and she just announces at dinner that she's going to be ridiculous and it ought not to work at all but it's it's one of the most i just thought it was one of the the scene where she comes and she just announces at dinner that she's going to be moving it's really exhilarating it's funny and exhilarating which is a really interesting combination that you don't get together very often actually she has a sort of i've got to say she has a sort of almost a sort of sexual awakening as well because um can i read you oh yeah so she goes to of course once she's a witch you know you have to go to a witch's sabbath and they're all dancing and at first she goes i don't think i like this i never liked dancers it's awful it's just as bad as you know being in a kind of awful

dance in town and then these depressing thoughts were interrupted by red-haired emily who came spinning from her partner's arms seized hold of of Laura and carried her back into the dance. Laura liked dancing with Emily. The pasty-faced and anemic young slattern who she had seen dawdling about the village danced with a fervour that annihilated every misgiving. They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction.

A strand of the red hair came undone and brushed across Laura's face. The contact made her tingle from head to foot. She shut her eyes and dived into obliviousness with Emily for a partner she could dance until the gunpowder ran out of the heels of her boots. Oh, that's great, isn't it? I mean, she's having a nice time. Matthew, Matthew, Matthew,

I don't want to miss the chance of a tenuous link here. The tenuous link, do we feel one? Yeah, no, weirdly there is a tenuous link. So in previous podcasts... You say weirdly. Surely, by now it's not. So weirdly we've done tenuous links to Andy, we've done a tenuous link to John before. And there's actually a tenuous link to me in Sylvia Townsend Warner, which is that... So I live in a village in Sussex called Kingston.

And I discovered that she was a regular visitor to Kingston, in fact. And she used to go and stay with Ian and Trekkie Parsons. So Ian Parsons was the chairman of Chatterham Windows, her publisher. I think when she started, he was a kind of junior then. He ended up being the boss. And Trekkie was his wife. That was her nickname. But that's what everyone knew her as and she was an artist and they were kind of so they're in Kingston which is just down

the road from Rodmore where um Leonard Wolfe and Virginia Wolfe lived and after Virginia died by walking down to the river with her coat full of stones Trekkie had a relationship with Leonard she stayed with Ian but for 30 years or so she was quite a lot younger than they had a relationship with Leonard. She stayed with Ian, but for 30 years or so, she was quite a lot younger then, they had a relationship. It was never really clear whether it was consummated or not, but she'd go on holiday with him every year, she'd go on holiday with her husband as well. And Ian also, Ian Parsons,

had a long-standing affair with Nora Smallwood, who was also the boss of Chatham Winders, a kind of legendary female publishing figure. So I kind of think it's just interesting that Sylvia had an unconventional life and she had all these friends around her that had this kind of, they were very

respectable, but they were kind of unconventional. And people in the village have said to me, when I've asked her, what do you do? And I say, I work in publishing. They used to be a fellow up the road who worked in publishing. And people have said that to me before, and they never knew who it was until this week, when I discovered who it was through reading about Soviet terms of war,

which is fantastic. So I walk past that house all the time, and I'll think of her every time I do that from now on. I mean, she's remarkable. I get the feeling, I mean, I've been from now on. I mean she's remarkable I get the feeling I mean I've been reading her letters I've got one of my most treasured possessions is a selection of her letters edited by William Maxwell who I had the great fortune to publish at the very end of his life he was the fiction editor for 40 years of the New Yorker and like I said earlier, she had this early success with with Lolly Willows in America, but then became one of the regular people who had their short stories published in in the New Yorker, none of which I've read, but which I sort of want to go back to. Yeah, they're about elves, aren't they?

They're kind of elf and kingdom. It's always the end of their life. Yeah. And he he anyways, it's lovely sort of dedicated copy of a letter saying, you know, my three-year labour of love. She made Maxwell her literary executor. Maxwell said, I'll just interrupt you, Maxwell said, he wrote, Sylvia Townsend Warner once said, I write short stories for money, but it was quite untrue. She wrote to please herself and because she had no choice. She just comes

across as one of, you know, often with writers you read them rather like Samantha was saying, you know, you kind of actually maybe Cathy wasn't a very nice person. But you know, sometimes with writers you read them and think, oh, I love their work but I really wouldn't want to have dinner with them.

I can't think of anyone i would more love to have spent an evening with the simply in town yeah she reminds me we have we had a until recently in fact when she just died at 102 we had an elderly woman archaeologist in the next village and in fact there were two elderly women archaeologists both living in by chance next door to one another wait for an elderly but they were they used to make jam and you felt they were kind of they were sort of like they had that sort of witchy kind of but also connection with

and it reminded me that in the book she writes about wanting to keep a donkey and I remember Nancy Saunders Nancy Saunders also another link here tenuous link as N.K. Sanders because you couldn't want to be known

that she was a woman particularly as a scholar was that she translated the Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time for Penguin Classics but she was also, she went hunting on a donkey which is very Sylvia Townsend Warner.

That's what I wanted to do. Almost impossible, but she showed me pictures of her when she was a little girl. What do you hunt on a donkey? Well, I mean, I think in those days it would have been a fox. But slowly, obviously. She pops up in... I was reading Julia Blackman's book about John Krask. It's called Threads.

And so John Krask was this, you know, fisherman who had a terrible sort of injury during the war. And then he was sort of confined to his bed and he started painting because he couldn't really do it. He had to be lying down and he started doing embroidery. And he wouldn't have, you know, sold any of his work, really, if it wasn't for Sylvie Townsend Warner and Valentine Acklin because they championed him.

I think because they like outsiders and outlaws and people who were on the edges. The thing about Sylvia Townsend-Warner, I just want to say a little bit about her other novels, which are so different from one another, but like J.L. Carr's novels, the more of them you read, the more depth you can see in them. I read last week, after the death of Don Juan,

on the recommendation of John from the LRB bookshop, who had grabbed me by the arm and said, she is the greatest novelist of the century. And you've got to read this book. And thanks, John, it was fantastic. It retells the story of Don Juan... Same thing again? What's the book called? After the Death of Don Juan. Oh, After the story of Don Juan after the death of Don Juan.

And it retells the events from Mozart's opera from the perspective of the villagers who have to put up with it. And while being simultaneously a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War in a way which starts off as amusing and ends up utterly passionate. It's a wonderful book. I've never read anything like it. But the other novel I read was a novel that she wrote ten years later called The Corner That Held Them, which is about 50 years in the life of a 14th-century convent.

It is a masterpiece. I think Lolly Willows is a fantastic book. I thought After the Death of Don Juan was great. The Corner That Held Them is the best novel I've read for months and months and months. It has no plot. All the nuns talk rather like you would expect Sylvia Townsend Warner and her friends her friends to talk and yet it is so exquisitely made in terms of evoking time and place and it's funny and it's passionate

and I've never read anything like it. I realise one of the great boons about doing this podcast is we get to immerse ourselves for a week or two in these wonderful writers. So it's not just the novel that you bring, Samantha.

It's also just getting to know a writer. I want to go and read all of them. There's just great titles as well. I mean, Mr Fortune's Maggot. That's very funny and very good. The Corner That Held Them and then her last novel, The Flint Anchor. They're such great titles. Samantha, you were saying that Summer Will Show is really good.

Summer Will Show is very good. It's a woman who goes off to revolutionary France to chase down her husband who is seeing another woman and she just gets more interested in his mistress and she also gets swept up into revolutionary politics and discovers her sort of anarchists, you know. But that's the amazing thing about the... I mean, we're saying the books are different from one another,

but certain things that they have in common, like the corner that held them, is a deeply communistic novel. It's a Marxian reading of the economics of British society in the 14th century seen through the accounts of a convent. I mean, axist witch who writes brilliant english sentences i mean what honestly yeah they're just incredibly subversive all the

books of hers i think that i've read which isn't all of them but they're incredibly subversive they they take nothing is sacred you know from the resonant voice of the the clergyman to you know to anything else and she just encourages you to sort of take things down, you know, if you want to, and to sort of look at the world in a new way. It feels very refreshing to read her, I think. Sarah Waters says that she's relatively underappreciated, as she said in her introduction to Lolly Willows, a fact that baffles, frustrates, and I think secretly pleases her admirers.

Because she's the kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership which I kind of I sort of can see that you're not going to tell everybody you know to read her but the people who you know would love this kind of I think she is extraordinary line by line she's wonderful

she's so funny she does surprise you on every page I think I found it very surprising to read her novels humour, Marx know, and she does surprise you on every page, I think. I found it very surprising to read her novels. Humour, Marxism, witchcraft. With that, we have to end. Thanks to Samantha Ellis, and of course always to Matthew,

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