the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Sylvia Townsend Warner : Lolly Willowes

'Tuesday 12th July. I do not like ?Lolly Willowes?. [...] I do not like these fantastic things which suggest that they have something to tell which one is too stupid to discover. I am not stupid, and if a writer deliberately sets out either to obscure or to deliberately draw red-herrings across the track of analysis, then it is the author?s fault if the reader?s ideas do not coincide with the writer?s intentions. I do not know what ?Lolly Willowes? ?means?. If it is about witchcraft or the witch temperament or a peculiar eccentricity of outlook which may be termed the witch mind, well and good, But the fantastic flickering style of the prose, whilst delightful to read as poetic word sequences, annoys me when I desire to know how far the author desires to be taken simply and literally, and know the reader is expected to gather the point of the book or to exercise his own fancy on it. I can however understand the queer blurred effect of the world as seen by the reader through the heroine?s eyes. I have felt the world about me in similarly usual fashion, but what has this to do with witchcraft: Indigestion possibly.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore      Print: Book

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