{"id":73983,"date":"2025-05-06T15:44:37","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T19:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=73983"},"modified":"2025-05-14T15:38:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T19:38:06","slug":"sub-rosa-reading-group-lolly-willowes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2025\/05\/06\/sub-rosa-reading-group-lolly-willowes\/","title":{"rendered":"Sub-Rosa Reading Group: Lolly Willowes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.<\/p>\n

Our selection for this month is Lolly Willowes<\/em><\/a> by Sylvia Townsend Warner.<\/p>\n

We will meet Saturday, May 31 at 6:30 p.m. at the store.<\/p>\n

If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com, message Book Beat on Instagram, or inquire in-store.<\/p>\n

Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.<\/p>\n

\n

In Lolly Willowes<\/em>, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster\u2019s struggle to break way from her controlling family\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c[The book] I\u2019ll be pressing into people\u2019s hands forever is Lolly Willowes<\/em>, the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness.\u201d\u2014Helen Macdonald in The New York Times Book Review<\/em>‘s \u201cBy the Book”<\/p>\n

“I wish I could understand how fluidly [Lolly Willows<\/em>] handles time and how it manages to be both utterly savage and strangely gentle at once. The turns of phrase that gleam on every page often seem nearly miraculous to me.”\u2014Garth Greenwall, LitHub<\/em><\/p>\n

“Sylvia Townsend Warner\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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.”\u2014John Updike<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893\u20131978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes<\/em>, appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune\u2019s Maggot<\/em>, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation<\/em> was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner\u2019s biographer Claire Harman, it \u201cwas almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda\u201d to Mr. Fortune\u2019s Maggot<\/em>. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it \u201cthe purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote.\u201d Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature. Our selection for this month is Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. We will meet Saturday, May 31 at 6:30 p.m. at the store. If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com, message Book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,25],"tags":[855],"class_list":["post-73983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-reading-group","tag-sub-rosa-reading-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}