Lolly Willowes

Sylvia Townsend Warner

juin 2011 · New York Review of Books

À propos de cet ebook

“This is the witty, eerie, tender but firm life history of a middle-class Englishwoman who politely declines to make the expected connection with the opposite sex and becomes a witch instead.”—John Updike

Part “family saga,” part supernatural feminist novel, this 1926 debut “tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness.” (Helen Macdonald, The New York Times)

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

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Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a devoted member of the Communist Party. Her many books include Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and Lolly Willows (both published by NYRB Classics), The Corner that Held Them, andKingdoms of Elfin.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.