When Laura Willowes’ father dies, she goes to live in London with her older brother and his family. She is twenty-eight, under pressure to find a husband. But Laura shuns the local tea parties and genial balls, for there is never “an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches.” And besides, she has the unfortunate habit of making rather odd remarks at dinner parties, such as when she tells Mr. Arbuthnot, apropos of very little: “If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.” It’s this very remark, in fact, that convinces Laura’s wards to cease and desist from any attempts to marry her off.

And so, Laura becomes “Aunt Lolly”, a caretaker for the younger children, accompanying them on seaside holidays, even though she’d rather “go by herself for long walks inland and find strange herbs”. She is prone to seasonal fugue, a “recurrent autumnal fever”, and daydreams of dark woods. Days become years, years become decades; the spinster bides her time. One day, shopping for chrysanthemums on Moscow Road, Lolly sniffs a bouquet of beech sprays. “They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination.” She enquires after their origin. “From near Chenies, ma’am, in Buckinghamshire.” That evening, at dinner, she announces a change of course to her extended family, whose mouths gape in bafflement: “Great Mop is a village in the Chilterns, and I am going to live there, and perhaps keep a donkey.” (Readers bedeviled by spoilers would be wise to leave off here.)

In Great Mop, “she lived in perfect idleness and contentment, growing each day more freckled and more rooted in peace”, with little company but that of her landlady, a Mrs. Leak. Until, that is, her nephew, Titus — now a churlish aspiring writer, fond of beer and raspberries — comes to mooch off Aunt Lolly, forcing her back into the domestic servitude she had so radically escaped. One evening, in anguish, she stumbles toward “darkening trees that waited there so stilly” and into the woods of which she had dreamed her entire life. And suddenly the heretofore social novel metamorphoses into something much more strange: ‘She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood.”

She is not alone in her compact: Mrs. Leak, it turns out, is also a witch — as are many other women in Great Mop. Soon after her pledge to Satan, Lolly attends the Witches’ Sabbath, a dark inversion of the balls that she had always eschewed. She meets Emily, a “pasty-faced and anaemic young slattern”, and the women interlock their writhing bodies. “They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction.” Satan arrives at the sabbath in the guise of a loving huntsman; he looks like “a Chinaman”, with “the face of a very young girl”. With his serpent’s tongue, he licks Lolly’s right cheek: “How are you enjoying your first Sabbath, Miss Willowes?”

Misfortune begins to continually befall Titus. His milk constantly curdles; a hairdresser butchers his boyish locks; he falls face-first into a wasps’ nest in the woods. Finally, he becomes engaged to a woman named Pandora (bodes well) and moves back to London; and finally, Lolly is truly alone with the “satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership” of her one true love: the Devil. The novel ends with a meditation on all the witchy women of Europe, who have opted out of the snares of patriarchy.

When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded, I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. . . . Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. . . . Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair. . . . That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. . . . It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) wrote Lolly Willowes, her debut novel, shortly before meeting her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland (née Mary Kathleen Macrory). At first she was self-conscious in the presence of Ackland — “young, poised and beautiful, and I was none of these things” — but Warner invited her to stay in a spare room at Miss Green, the worker’s cottage that Warner had purchased in East Chaldon in 1929. They would live together for thirty-eight years, and catch the attention of M15 for their communist activities. When Virginia Woolf once asked Warner, at a party in Bloomsbury, how she knew so much about witches, the author of Lolly Willowes replied matter-of-factly: “Because I am one.”