Sylvia Townsend Warner’s delightful novel, Lolly Willowes, was the first Book-of-the-Month selection in 1926. It is the strange, cozy story of a spinster who escapes from her stuffy family to live in a village where she practices witchcraft and converses with Satan. Quirky stuff, magical, with bits of magic realism, as befits Warner’s imagination.
Many of her books have a fairy-tale element, but not all. I recently reread Summer Will Show (1932), a historical novel set in mid-19th-century England and France. The heroine, Sophia Willoughby, a wealthy, grieving, cranky woman who has lost her two children to smallpox, ends up in France in 1848, during the Revolution fought by the Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, and Communists. Sophia has gone to France to demand that her husband, Frederick, from whom she is separated, impregnate her so she will not be childless.
She does not broach the subject with Frederick after all. Instead, she moves in with Frederick’s mistress, Minna, who has an enchanting talent: telling fairy tales rooted in the history of the Jews. Rich people pay her to perform at parties. And Sophia is spellbound.
Sophia and Minna converse intensely, go to cheap restaurants, and throw parties for bohemians and revolutionaries. They are radicals who visit the barricades and eventually get caught up, by accident, in the fighting.
The dialogue is intense and intriguing. Sophia becomes friendly with Inglebrecht, a Communist who “even among the Revolutionaries… is considered to go too far.”
The two of them argue about feminism. She asks, “Should there be no brains under bonnets?”
And that is a very Sylvia Townsend Warner aphorism.