Book Beat’s April Reading Group Selection is Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The Reading Group will meet Wednesday, April 24 at 7pm in the Goldfish Teahouse (117 W 4th St #101 in downtown Royal Oak). Reading Group books are discounted 15% at Book Beat. All are welcome!

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel is an enduring, subversive, and lyrical portrait of spinsterhood in post-World War I Britain. Lolly is a single woman and after her father dies, she is moved, as a matter of course, to her brother’s house, where she meekly obliges to play caregiver to his children and housemaid to his wife. After 20 years of this life she moves to the rural village of Great Mop. She feels an affinity for the town, the countryside, and her new neighbors. She blossoms emotionally and spiritually, and as she does so, she discovers an important secret: She is a witch, as is everybody else who lives in Great Mop. A graceful read in the tradition of women’s fiction and magic realism.

“Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved. In Lolly Willowes, her first novel, she moves with somber confidence into the realm of the supernatural, and her prose, in its simple, abrupt evocations, has something preternatural about it. 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

“Lolly Willowes . . . remains a novel as original in its conception as it is subtle and refined in its artistry.”––Times Literary Supplement

“A skillfully told morality tale.”––New York Times Book Review

“Lolly Willowes calls for “a life of one’s own” three years before Virginia Woolf’s impassioned cry for a room. “We have more need of you,” she explains to the devil. “Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance.” With its clear feminist agenda, Lolly Willowes holds its own among Townsend Warner’s historical fiction, but it’s also an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era.”  --The Guardian

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a highly individual writer of novels, short stories and poems. She contributed short stories to the New Yorker for more than forty years, translated Proust’s Contre Saint-Beuve into English, wrote a biography of the novelist T.H.White and a guide to Somerset.

Born in 1893, Sylvia was the only child of Harrow School housemaster George Townsend Warner (remembered as a brilliant teacher) and his wife, Nora. After an unsuccessful term at kindergarten she was educated at home. Sylvia was an accomplished musician, and it is said that the outbreak of War in 1914 alone prevented her from going abroad to study composition under Arnold Schoenberg. In 1917, she joined the Committee preparing the ten volumes of Tudor Church Music published by Oxford University Press between 1922 and 1929. One of her fellow committee members – and long-time lover – was Percy Buck, a married man twenty-two years her senior.

Tall, thin and bespectacled, Sylvia was a disappointment to her mother, with whom she had an uneasy relationship. After her mother’s remarriage (George Townsend Warner died suddenly in 1916) matters improved, but mother and daughter were never to be close.   -continue to read more at:  The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society

The Book Beat Reading Group selection for February is Jean Rhys’ masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea. The Reading Group will meet on Wednesday, February 27 at 7pm in The Goldfish Teahouse (117 W. Fourth St. in Downtown Royal Oak).  Books are discounted 15% at Book Beat. All are welcome!

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known–a house with a garden where “the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched.”

The novel is Rhys’s answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë’s book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell–that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester’s terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys’s imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester’s. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. “I watched her die many times,” observes the new husband. “In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty.”

Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and ’30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the ’40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world–she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published in 1966 when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, “has come too late.” Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness.