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Writer's pictureRebecca Beattie

Literary Witches of the Twenties: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, and the Loving Huntsman

Over the course of the next few weeks, I am going to be re-publishing some of the articles I have written for various journals. Its partly as a record, and partly to re-share some of the ideas I have written about. Feel free to get in touch, comment, respond. Its great to see this place as a dialogue rather than a one-way conversation. In some places I will be adding my own comments or expanding on things I had touched on originally. Where that is the case, I will indicate that…

This first one was published by the fabulous team at Enquiring Eye, headed up by Rupert White.




Literary Witches of the Twenties: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, and the Loving Huntsman


Dr. Rebecca Beattie


I first encountered Sylvia Townsend Warner at Senate House Library in London, in a pile of lost and forgotten twenties writers. Of course, we didn’t meet in person as we live a century apart. I was on the hunt for forgotten women writers of the early Twentieth Century, and the trail neatly led through the stacks (which means they are so overlooked, they are not even on the shelves but stored in a back area) from Mary Webb to Sylvia Townsend Warner. When I discovered, Townsend-Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes or The Loving Huntsman I thought Christmas had come early.


Townsend Warner has quite rightly been receiving somewhat of a revival over recent years. She was a musicologist, a poet, novelist, and biographer, and her prolific career spanned decades –she was publishing new work from 1925 right up until to her death in 1978 aged 84. Author of eight volumes of poetry, twenty of short stories, and seven novels including Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927) and The True Heart (1929), her first and most famous novel, is Lolly Willowes. In it her heroine not only presents herself as a fabulous archetype of the witch, but also gives us an insight into what might have been happening at a Witches’ Grand Sabbat in the twenties (had such a thing existed) and she also offers some intriguing links to the work of Margaret Murray. While Murray’s work as an anthropologist and Egyptologist may have been discredited, I am a fiction writer, and as such, am always far more forgiving of those who, like me, use imagination to fill in the gaps. My research sits at the intersection where the archetype of the fictional witch meets the practicing pagan witch, and frequently, when I read fiction, I find myself wondering, what came first, the witch or the literary witch?


Laura Willowes is an unmarried woman in her thirties, who flees the confines of her middle-class upbringing for freedom in the countryside. In her family home she gathers herbs, brews beers, and reads books that are viewed as 'unfeminine' in nature, which sets her family into a tailspin. These include books on botany, philosophy and demonology. She has become the eccentric Maiden Aunt Lolly, a status that she finds deeply unsatisfying, so she moves to the village of Great Mop, where she thinks she can live as she chooses.

Like her heroine, Lolly, Townsend Warner was a rebel of the best kind, turning the view of inter-war women on its head, particularly views of unmarried and lesbian women, and this inevitably becomes part of Lolly’s appeal. Working in a munitions factory during the First World War, Townsend Warner associated with the Bright Young Things during the 1920s, a group that included Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Townsend Warner's most famous work, Lolly Willowes can be read on many levels. It is the story of a witch finding herself in the countryside, but it is also a commentary on the position of women in the inter-war years. At this time, unmarried women were viewed as being at risk of becoming hard and unfeminine, and of falling into lesbianism, and both Lolly and Townsend-Warner exemplify these fears.


At the age of 34, Townsend Warner met her life partner, Valentine Ackland. Valentine, who was born Molly, had come from a materially wealthy, but emotionally poor, background. By the time she and Townsend Warner met in 1930, Molly had changed her name to the more androgynous Valentine and was dressing in men's clothing. Although the couple stayed together until Valentine's death from breast cancer in 1969, the relationship was troubled. Ackland (a poet) was crippled by self-doubt and alcoholism and was frequently unfaithful to Townsend Warner. But their partnership lasted 39 years, and they were political movers and shakers – both being members of the Communist party, they were investigated by MI5 and actively sought to challenge assumptions about the roles women could take in society, and the lives they should live.


While Ackland continued a lifelong (and quite dysfunctional) relationship with the Catholic Church, Townsend Warner had rejected Christianity early in life and found her spiritual beliefs in nature, and this imagery suffuses the novel. Just like our Modern-day pagan witches, it is nature that calls Lolly to witchcraft, with a description that includes the familiar pagan trope of the Wild Hunt, as the trees chant the Witches’ Rune:


All one day the wind had risen, and late in the evening it called her out. She went up to the top of Cubbey Ridge, past the ruined windmill that clattered with its torn sails. When she had come to the top of the ridge she stopped, with difficulty holding herself upright. She felt the wind swoop down close to the earth. The moon was out hunting overhead, her pack of black and white hounds ranged over the sky. Moon and wind and clouds hunted an invisible quarry. The wind routed through the woods. Laura from the hill-top heard the various surrounding woods cry out with different voices. The spent gusts left the beech-hangers throbbing like sea caverns through which the wave had passed, the fir-plantation seemed to chant some never ending rune.


Once Laura settles in, she starts getting to know the rather curious inhabitants of Great Mop, who all seem to mysteriously disappear into the countryside once a month. Lolly soon discovers that they are in fact a coven of witches, who dance ecstatically under the stars with their leader, the devil. Invited to join them, Lolly takes an oath of fealty to Satan and becomes a witch, gathering about her the remaining accoutrements that go with that role; she lives in a cottage, and she also adopts her familiar, a black cat called Vinegar. But Lolly discovers life as a witch is not immediately straightforward.


A familiar discouragement began to settle upon her spirits. In spite of her hopes she was not going to enjoy herself. Even as a witch, it seemed, she was doomed to social failure, and her first Sabbath was not going to open livelier vistas than were opened by her first ball. With the best intentions she had never managed to enjoy them. The first hour was well enough, but after that came increasing listlessness and boredom.


Telling the Devil that she does not like his Sabbath one bit, she walks off into the night, wondering if this means she is no longer a ‘proper’ witch.


With Lolly Willowes Townsend Warner took her principal inspiration from Margaret Murray's work, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, having been deeply affected by it. Townsend Warner felt affinity with the women caught up in the witch trials. When Lolly Willowes was published, she sent a copy to Murray, stating that her dearest wish was to join Margaret Murray's coven. While Murray’s work may have been discredited in the intervening years, it could be argued that her influence on the newly emerging views of witchcraft throughout the twentieth century are considerable. As I mentioned earlier - sometimes it is difficult to distinguish what came first – the witch, or the literary witch. While Murray’s vision of the witch cult may have been more fiction than anthropological fact, nevertheless, it influenced what came later. All of which leads us neatly on to our twenties vision of the Witch’s god. Those of you who are eagle eyed, will have noticed that the novel has a second title – Lolly Willows or the Loving Huntsman. This sometimes gets dropped in recent editions of the book, but the Loving Huntsman plays an important role in Lolly’s exploration of life as a twenties witch, and Townsend Warner’s view of Satan clearly owes more to Murray than it does to the Christian bible. In The Witch Cult, Murray writes:


It is impossible to understand the witch−cult without first understanding the position of the chief personage of that cult.

‘Known variously as Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, the Foul Field and the enemy of Salvation’, so far, his character is not looking good, but Murray goes on to write:


The evidence of the witches makes it abundantly clear that the so−called Devil was a human being, generally a man, occasionally a woman. At the great Sabbaths, where he appeared in his grand array, he was disguised out of recognition; at the small meetings, in visiting his votaries, or when inducing a possible convert to join the ranks of the witch−society, he came in his own person, usually dressed plainly in the costume of the period. When in ordinary clothes he was indistinguishable from any other man of his own rank or age, but the evidence suggests that he made himself known by some manual gesture, by a password, or by some token carried on his person.


What some critics, and even Townsend Warner, may have christened 'the Devil', a modern pagan reader will recognise as something else. Murray’s later vision of The God of the Witches had clearly softened by the time she published her later book in 1931. Perhaps the communication between Murray and Townsend Warner and the reading of Lolly Willowes had allowed a cross-pollination to occur? [Edit: In fact, I would go a step further than this and say that Lolly Willowes absolutely had softened Murray’s view of Satan, and helped her to create a much more charming and affable figure than her earlier ideas.] Satan as portrayed in Lolly Willows is far more personable, and more akin to Murray’s later writing on him. The Loving Huntsman allows Lolly to find herself, and Lolly’s most significant encounters with him always happen in nature, where she seeks solace. In one encounter, Lolly meets him on a hillside, near the burial folly of a satanic baronet, Sir Ralph Maulgrave, who was said to ride around Buckinghamshire on a zebra (probably fashioned on Francis Dashwood the infamous founder of the Hellfire Club in Buckinghamshire). As Lolly is reflecting on this,


She felt a thrill of anger as she saw a gardener come out of the enclosure, carrying a flag basket and a pair of shears. He came towards her, and something about the rather slouching and prowling gait struck her as being familiar. She looked more closely, and recognised Satan.

‘So you are a grave-keeper as well as a gamekeeper?’

‘The Council employ me to cut the bushes,’ he answered.

‘O Satan!’ she exclaimed, hurt by his equivocations. ‘Do you always hide?’

With the gesture of a man who can never hold out against women, he yielded and sat down beside her on the grass. Laura felt a momentary embarrassment. She had long wished for a reasonable conversation with her Master, but now that her wish seemed about to be granted, she felt rather at a loss for an opening.


This encounter helps Lolly to shed light on why she, and women like her, might be inclined to witchcraft. Lolly concludes,


One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that –to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life… 


It is her master, the Loving Huntsman, that enables her to get to the bottom of her feelings.


‘O Satan! Why do you encourage me to talk when you know all my thoughts?’ 

‘I encourage you to talk, not that I may know all your thoughts, but that you may,’ he replies.


Lolly Willowes, then, gives us a very apparently light-hearted yet poignant view into the fantasy version of what the life of a witch might be like, which paves the way for more of our later literary witches, and perhaps real witches too. Lolly goes under the radar; she lives in a community that is accepting of her eccentricities. Townsend Warner’s witch lives in a cottage, has a familiar, and attends the witches sabbats, and has sworn fealty to the god of the witches. There is no mention of maleficium, witch trials or executions, instead Lolly is engaging and a delightful companion to have. For Townsend Warner it is what she imagined the witch to be, and what she wished she was, having read Margaret Murray.

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