From Alienation to Community: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Utopian Modernism

Abstract

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman,¹ begins with the death of the protagonist’s father, but by no means with the death of patriarchal control. It is 1902 and Laura, in her late twenties and unmarried, is bequeathed a large inheritance. But no one in her family suggests that Laura use the money to set up her own home:

Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best. The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willowes were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. (7)

Laura, as part of her father’s estate, is passed to the next generation of men. And, in keeping with traditional views of women’s place within culture, the first part of Warner’s narrative seems to function as a realist historical/domestic novel that follows the alienated, yet unremarkable, life of Laura from her birth in 1874 until the end of the Great War.