Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Laura had not listened to the stock-dove; she had not seen the haze thickening overhead. She walked up and down in despair and rebellion. She walked slowly, for she felt the weight of her chains. Once more they had been fastened upon her. She had worn them for many years, acquiescently, scarcely feeling their weight. Now she felt it. And, with their weight, she felt their familiarity, and the familiarity was worst of all: Titus had seen her starting out. He had cried: “Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a minute, and I’ll come too.” She had feigned not to hear him and had walked on. She had not turned her head until she was out of the village, she expected at every moment to hear him come bounding up behind her. Had he done so, she thought she would have turned round and snarled at him. For she wanted, oh! how much she wanted, to be left alone for once.

The story of Laura Willowes begins, as most stories do, with a bunch of men. In fact, much more time is spent in the early going talking about family history, her brothers' marriages, her father's illness and death, and her subsequent shuttling off to live with her brother Henry, than about Laura herself. Aside from her love of her father and her love of nature, Laura does very little: she is passively acted upon and her feelings about the things that are happening are opaque to us. The biggest development in the first half of the book is right there in the title: Laura becomes Aunt Lolly.

Her role is circumscribed by the expectations placed on a single woman with no family around the turn of the century. She assists her sister-in-law around the house, takes care of the newborns, most notably a boy named Titus, and is occupied from dawn to dusk with responsibilities that are pushed upon her, though she hardly seems to realize it.

But the structure is such that the reader is barely aware of what is going on; Warner strings us along in such a traditional realist narrative that none of this seems out of the ordinary--after all, that's how most of these stories go, regardless of mode--Agnes Grey, Emma, etc. And then, at almost exactly the midpoint, Lolly decides to move to Great Mop and start her own life. Her brother, Henry, greatly objects, first because she's, well, a single woman, and secondly because he's gambled away her trust in what I can only assume is the Dogecoin of 1926. He sister-in-law passive aggressively wonders how she'll carry on without Lolly. Only Titus, now in his late teens, supports her schemes, although once he realizes she's serious his ardour cools as well--but the next section picks up in Great Mop, with Lolly alone, at least for a while.

Lolly starts coming into her own, forming some loose community with the inhabitants of Great Mop, and even feints at the idea of a romance, but this is not that sort of book, and just as Lolly is asserting herself, who should show up but Titus. At first happy to see him, Lolly soon finds herself being fed back into the same sorts of rut she left to escape--she's mending clothes, making food, handling social events and worst of all, she's once again never alone. So one day, while out walking, Lolly makes a deal with Satan--he can have her soul, and he'll give her back her agency.

So, this happens about 50pp from the end of the book, and after Titus is attacked by bees, rapidly engaged, and leaves within 48 hours, Lolly is all in--but it's not as if she goes all in with cauldrons and newt's eggs. She's content only to have her solitude back. The final setpiece in the book is a conversation with Satan, which is where most of what I've spelled out thematically comes together--indepenedence is so desirable, so necessary, for women that they make easy prey for Satan. But Satan doesn't appear to prey on them, per se. It's about the thrill of the chase--once they're caught he has no interest, contra the patriarchal God of Henry, in a relationship. He's a deistic sort, gentlemanly, cagey about the whole "eternal hell" thing, and he leaves Lolly, on the last page, feeling unsettled and simultaneously at peace. Better to recline in Hell than serve in Heaven.