Books 2015 - Readers in Peril Challenge Book 7 - Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

[byslantedlight]

After the death of her adored father, Laura "Lolly" Willowes settles into her role of the 'indispensable' maiden aunt of the family, wholly dependent, an unpaid nanny and housekeeper. Two decades pass; the children are grown, and Lolly unexpectedly moves to a village, alone. Here, happy and unfettered, she revels in a new existence, nagged only by the sense of a secret she has yet to discover...

This book arrived from Wordery the other day, courtesy of inspiration from read_warbler, who reviewed it for the RiP challenge. It sounded like just my thing - and it was! It's a the sort of a story that's disturbing in the ordinariness of Lolly's life, or perhaps in the way that she stands out as unordinary, despite not being loud or active or 'special'in any way except for being herself, within the even greater ordinariness of everyone else. But she is different, because she eventually breaks away from expectations, and follows nothing more than imagination and intuition to go and live in a small village that is an entirely different kind of ordinary, and one where it turns out she fits in perfectly, even while she's the unknown stranger. Here it doesn't matter what other people think of her, and because it doesn't matter she's free to be herself with all of them. It's not a weird village in any particularly spooky sense, although there's more going on than Lolly had been able to see in London - it's just that the distance there is between herself and villagers means that she's able to feel the world itself, and what it's telling her about life, and everything that she's able to do. Is it really a deep satanic witchcraft that finally frees her? Is that really what's happening when she gives her heart and soul to the devil? It's a frightening thing when she realises what she's done - but the pure freedom of it is wonderful, and suddenly she's in harmony with the world...

Well, that's what I reckon, anyway. *g* I love books that make you think about things in a slightly different way, and this story gives you the freedom to think about witchcraft and women and the devil and religion and men and people and society and all in a different way. I read the introduction when I'd finished the story, and like read_warbler was rather fascinated by the author herself - I want to know more about her now! In Victorian and Edwardian England she had a long affair with a married man, and then fell in love with Valentine Ackland, the woman with whom she lived "in rural outlawry" for 39 years. What the introduction says about her writing Lolly Willowes is that Having read verbatim accounts of sixteenth-century Scottish witch-trials and been struck, as she described it, by the 'romance' of witchcraft for the women who became involved with it, the 'release' it represented from 'hard lives' and 'dull futures', it occurred to her to try out a novel on this theme, but with a contemporary setting. She calls it "my story about a witch", and I love it for that, and for what it is! Thank you read_warbler!

Peril the First: Read four books, any length, that you feel fit (the very broad definitions) of R.I.P. literature. It could be King or Conan Doyle, Penny or Poe, Chandler or Collins, Lovecraft or Leroux… or anyone in between.
1. Night of the Living Deed by E.J. Copperman
2. Bedlam by Ally Kennan
3. The Ghosts of Motley Hall by Richard Carpenter
4. The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal by KJ Charles
5. Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater
6. The Taxidermist's Daughter by Kate Mosse
7. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Peril of the Short Story: We are big fans of short stories and the desire for them is perhaps no greater than in Autumn. You can read short stories any time during the challenge.
1. The Phantom Schooner (In Shudders and Shakes: Ghostly Tales from Australia, compiled by Anne Bower Ingram)
2. The Phantom Schooner (In Shudders and Shakes: Ghostly Tales from Australia, compiled by Anne Bower Ingram)
The Cooee Hut (In Shudders and Shakes: Ghostly Tales from Australia, compiled by Anne Bower Ingram)
4-30. All the spooky short Pros stories I've been reading for October...


Peril On the Screen: This is for those of us that like to watch suitably scary, eerie, mysterious gothic fare during this time of year. It may be something on the small screen or large. It might be a television show, like Dark Shadows or Midsomer Murders, or your favorite film.
1. The Ghosts of Motley Hall (Granada Television, 1976-78)