Lolly Willowes; or, the Loving Huntsman (1926) is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s debut — a novel that spends two hundred pages being a quiet English domestic story about a spinster aunt, and then hands its heroine a contract with Satan.

The setup is deliberately unremarkable. When Laura Willowes’s father dies, she is twenty-eight and under pressure to find a husband. She moves into her older brother’s London house, where she has no patience for tea parties and balls — there is never “an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches” — and keeps scaring off suitors with odd dinner-table remarks, like asking Mr. Arbuthnot whether he might be a were-wolf, since February is the month when one is most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep. So she becomes “Aunt Lolly”:

  • Caretaker for her brother’s children, dragged along on seaside holidays when she would rather walk inland alone and find strange herbs
  • Prone to a “recurrent autumnal fever” and daydreams of dark woods
  • Days become years, years become decades. The spinster bides her time

The hinge is a bouquet. Shopping for chrysanthemums on Moscow Road, Lolly sniffs a bunch of beech sprays — “They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods” — and asks where they came from. From near Chenies, ma’am, in Buckinghamshire. That evening she informs her gaping family that Great Mop is a village in the Chilterns, that she is going to live there, and that perhaps she will keep a donkey.

In Great Mop she lives “in perfect idleness and contentment, growing each day more freckled and more rooted in peace” — until her nephew Titus, a churlish aspiring writer fond of beer and raspberries, turns up to mooch off her and puts her straight back to work. In anguish, she stumbles into the woods she has dreamed of her whole life and enters into a compact with the Devil, “sealed with the round red seal of her blood.”

What follows is the novel’s real argument:

  • Her landlady Mrs. Leak is a witch, and so are many other women in Great Mop
  • The Witches’ Sabbath is a dark inversion of the balls Lolly always refused, with Satan arriving as a loving huntsman, looking like “a Chinaman” with “the face of a very young girl”
  • Titus’s life curdles — literally; his milk spoils, a hairdresser butchers his hair, he falls face-first into a wasps’ nest
  • He gets engaged to a woman named Pandora and goes back to London, leaving Lolly alone with the “satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership” of her one true love: the Devil

The book ends on the women of Europe who opted out — “as common as blackberries, and as unregarded… wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans” — with nothing before them “except subjection and plaiting their hair.”

That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure… It’s to escape all that — to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.

Warner’s own life rhymed with it. She wrote Lolly Willowes shortly before meeting the poet Valentine Ackland, “young, poised and beautiful, and I was none of these things,” and invited her to stay at Miss Green, the worker’s cottage she bought in East Chaldon in 1929. They lived together for thirty-eight years and drew the attention of MI5 for their communist activities. When Virginia Woolf once asked Warner how she knew so much about witches, Warner answered: “Because I am one.”

The PDR collection includes plates from the 1926 Viking Press edition; the text itself is now public domain and available as a free Standard Ebooks edition.