Lolly Willowes (Penguin Modern Classics)

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We have a witches sabbath (this turns out to consist of folk dancing) and we have friendly chats with Satan, the Evil One, re-configured as the Cosy One. If he was in the middle of a conversation and all of a sudden my brother or I did something or said something that was wrong in any way, he would stop, put on the mask and say, “Now, Kelly, remember to be kind and…” like if he didn’t correct me for making fun of someone’s shoes I was going to turn out to be a bad person who kills kittens and it was going to be his fault somehow. From Everard [her father] she got a little still, from the family recipe-books much information and good advice; and where these failed her, Nicholas Culpepper or old Goody Andrews, who might have been Nicholas’s crony by the respect she had for the moon, were ready to help her out. Laura, relieved, meets Satan at Mulgrave Folly and tells him that women are like 'sticks of dynamite' waiting to explode and that all women are witches even 'if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it's there – ready!

As an unmarried woman and youngest child in the family, Laura keeps house for her widowed father with consummate ease.It is here in the unfettered realm of the countryside that Laura is able to rediscover herself, finding freedom and independence in the most unexpected of sources.

It's confusing, too, that witchcraft isn't even confined to women: there are warlocks at the witches Sabbath scene.

Excerpts and links may be used, provided that the material is credited and referenced to JacquiWine’s Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.

Although Laura has inherited a decent income of her own, there is no question of her choosing to live independently. When she becomes a witch, it is the natural progression of the things that happened in her life and th events that led her to Great Mop.As someone who gave up a steady, well-paid job for the flexibility (aka uncertainty) of freelancing, I can definitely recommend the mid-life gear change as a route to a better quality of life. Somehow, that age was like Aurora’s sixteenth birthday and triggered a magic spell that meant that “duty” could be relaxed a little- only a little, and only gradually, but it happened.

Perhaps Townsend Warner, like her character, was deceptively gentle, while truly being, as Lolly contends of all women, “how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are. She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to relinquish her name also. And it's worth noting the trees and plants mentioned throughout the text: the willow, for example, which has sacred properties in druidic lore but which also reminded me of Viola's 'willow cabin' speech in Twelfth Night declaimed to Olivia and implicitly comparing female erotic desire with male modes of making love. It’s an excellent book, one of the most surprising and unexpected delights of my reading year to date. In short, I came here looking for a kinswoman to Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and found something very nice, very cute, and ultimately not what I needed.

And after I bought it but before I read it, I heard this book mentioned in passing on the Backlisted Podcast about "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," as an example of when witchcraft is used as a foil to show something about society, or something like that.