Feminist Reading Group

For October's Feminist Reading Group, we're getting into the witchy season with early feminist classic Lolly Willowes; or The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner!

When Laura Willowes’s beloved father dies, she is absorbed in the household of her brother and his family. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces. For twenty years, Lolly is neither indulgent nor impulsive, until one day when she decides to move to a village in the Chilterns, much to her family’s chagrin.

But it’s in the countryside, among nature, where Lolly has her first taste of freedom. Duty-bound to no one except herself, she revels in the solitary life. When her nephew moves there, and Lolly feels once again thrust into her old familial role, she reaches out to the otherworldly, to the darkness, to the unheeded power within the hearts of women to feel at peace once more...

"Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel Lolly Willowes is an act of defiance that gladdens the soul." -The Guardian

"I wish I could understand how fluidly [Lolly Willows] handles times 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." -Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain