Experiences of a lady worker: class, gender, and labor in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)

ABSTRACT

Sylvia Townsend Warner took rather a dim view of her first piece of published writing, an account of working in a munitions factory published in Blackwood's Magazine in February 1916. Looking back in 1939, she expressed not only aesthetic but also political distaste for the article. It was “youthfully precious” and written by a lady worker unwittingly co–opted into a scheme “devised to avoid the payment of overtime rates to the regular workers.” This article scrutinizes Warner's Blackwood's article, situating it in the context of contemporary debates about women's war work and considering how Warner's experiences of factory work informed her early thinking about the intersections of labor, class, and gender. These are themes that co–animate Warner's work of the 1920s and the second half of the article offers a reading of her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926).

KEYWORDS:

• Sylvia Townsend Warner
• class
• gender; labour
• World War One
• women's writing

Introduction

Sylvia Townsend Warner is well known for her political activism of the 1930s. Her formal commitment to communism in that decade has informed a cleft understanding of her literary output: by and large her novels of the 1920s have been read for their playful reworkings of genre to feminist ends, while her later novels have been read as more obviously “political.” This article re-reads the politics of her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), in the light of Warner’s earliest piece of journalism, an article about her work in a World War One (WWI) munitions factory published in 1916. Such a cross-generic approach reveals the interrogations of the economic order and class system frequently associated with Warner’s later novels are also present in her earlier work if we look for them in the right places.

Warner’s first publication appeared anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine in February 1916 and was entitled “Behind the Firing Line: Some Experiences in a Munition Factory by a Lady Worker.” Later in her life, as her disparaging comments about her first novel Lolly Willowes show she was apt to do, Warner took a dim view of this article. Writing in 1939 she expressed not only aesthetic but also political distaste for the Blackwood’s piece. It was she claimed, “youthfully precious” and written by a lady worker unwittingly co-opted into a scheme “devised to avoid the payment of overtime rates to the regular workers.”¹ Given its content and its engagement with issues of class and gender, Warner’s earliest essay has interested scholars researching these intersecting themes in her novels,² however little attention has been paid to the article in its own right. This article scrutinizes Warner’s Blackwood’s article as a literary and historical document, situating it in the context of contemporary debates about women’s war work and reading it alongside 1916 journalism on the subject and popular accounts written by other “Lady Workers.”³ Warner’s article has much to tell us about her political and social imagination at that moment, but it also introduces areas of critique that would preoccupy her throughout the 1920s. The ambivalent cross-class encounters with women workers Warner records in her finished article anticipate her engagement with the figure of the woman worker who, I argue, she places at the heart of the political commentary of Lolly Willowes.

In mid-1915 the Women Relief Munition Workers’ Organisation (WRMWO) was established by Lady Moir and Lady Cowan with the aim of attracting middle- and upper-class women into munitions work at the Vickers’ factory in Erith, Kent “to enable women factory workers to take weekends off without the machines being shut down.”⁴ Warner’s retrospective appraisal of the WRMWO as a “‘dilution’ scheme” and her self-characterization as a “blackleg” is slightly misleading. Dilution was certainly a hotly debated subject in 1915, but it usually referred to the measures undertaken to make the replacement of “skilled” male workers with “unskilled” female workers in factories acceptable to Trade Union leaders. Warner’s day of work each week prevented a regular worker from having to work seven days in a row and, in practice, the number of “leisured” women recruited to Moir and Cowan’s scheme was minimal and part of their attraction as workers was the fact they would be unlikely to resist giving their jobs “back” to returning men after the war, where working-class women might.⁵

This is not to say the co-option of middle-class women workers, sometimes referred to as “War Volunteers” (confusingly as they were paid the same rate as the other women workers), was uncontroversial. As Angela Woollacott notes, although their work was greeted with much fanfare in the wartime press, “middle-and upper-middle-class women munitions workers were a tiny fraction of the whole.”⁶ An article in the Daily News, lavishly detailing the first day at work for a number of “Lady Munition Workers,” including motoring to the factory, enjoying a hearty tea and “excellent lunch,” elicited a withering letter from Margaret Llewelyn Davies, leader of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. She points out the discrepancies between the treatment, conditions and pay of “lady” and “women” workers, concluding: “We are greatly indebted to the lady munition workers for showing what a reasonable standard of life ought to be.”⁷ The Government’s decision to appeal to these women was in fact partly motivated by their belief that they would have a greater capacity for skilled work than their working-class colleagues.⁸ Such assumptions were also held by some of the volunteers and tensions certainly existed between workers of different social classes.

These class tensions are in evidence in Warner’s article, and in other accounts by “lady workers.” Gay Wachman has praised “Behind the Firing Line” for its “surprising” want of “snobbery” and it is true that the article is not charged with the confident sense of social superiority which is discoverable in the other accounts discussed here.⁹ However, Warner’s article is edged with a subtle but nonetheless tenacious anxiety about class, her own and that of her working-class colleagues. This concern is not so much evident in what said, although the content of the article is revealing, so much as in Warner’s performative narrative voice and her stylistic decisions, particularly her preference for certain motifs and metaphors throughout the article.

The lady worker and the munitionette in “Behind the Firing Line”

Take the declarative opening to the article: “‘It seems rather a good scheme,’ I said, ‘I shall try it’.”¹⁰ Warner does not clarify to whom this is addressed. Perhaps she is speaking to herself? Enclosing this opening statement in speech marks creates a detachment between the narrator of these first lines and the article that follows. This distance draws attention to Warner’s interest in narrative voice throughout the piece during and at various points she appears to send up the “lady worker.” It becomes clear that this pompous opening serves Warner’s dramatic purposes for the first section of the article, which starts with her bragging to friends about “how hard” she was going to work before the challenges of factory life unfold: “Nobody seemed to love us, or need us, and this unlooked-for possibility was dashing to our spirits” (192). After “solacing” herself “with that ancient Simian proverb, ‘What one fool can do another can’,” Warner has her first lesson in “shell filling,” which proves another ignominy. Having improved her grasp of her work by the end of the first day’s training, however, Warner finishes her first day “laughing and swaggering” (193).

Robin Hackett comments on the self-satire at work in the article and it is discernable in this opening section with its exaggerated account of the novice’s emotions and sped-up version of her learning process.¹¹ Warner’s presentation of her bewilderment in her new role as impressively short-lived is telling in other ways. By only her second attempt at shell-filling she is expert enough to recognize the existence of a “personal equation,” an individual “temperament” in pieces of machinery: “This, I suppose, is the secret of that singular passion shown by some mechanics for their work” (193). These assertions about the nature of mechanics and their work do not ring true and the glibness continues as she compares an impiously-treated machine to the little hunchback “that gave occasion for such a deal of trepidation and story-telling in the city of Casgar, which is situated near the farther extremity of Great Tartary” (193). Warner’s extravagant conclusion is a cover for unease. Her efforts to impress with imaginative leaps and literary references, including the line above which is lifted wholesale from Edward Foster’s 1840 translation of The Arabian Nights, reads as an attempt to put distance between herself and the situation she describes. Warner clearly wanted to show off her intellectual and literary credentials in her first article, secured for her by her father who was also a regular contributor to Blackwood’s. Writing about Beatrice Potter’s (later Webb) early works of social observation, both Ann Ardis and Bryony Randall have noted the literary bent of early sociology and it is clear that some of what Warner is doing here is in an effort to ape that kind of work.¹² The incongruity of her frame of reference is also meant to be funny, although what it actually betrays is her discomfort at her own incongruity, her own sense of being in the wrong place. The same impulse is present in Warner’s gesture to “that ancient Simian proverb, ‘What one fool can do another can’.” Although Warner includes herself in her implied insult this is not the leveling remark it was perhaps intended to be. Instead, her breezy dismissiveness of the factory’s regular workers and their labor and her failure to refer to them explicitly except until significantly later in the article suggest an unarticulated anxiety about these women and their reception of her.

Worry about cross-class encounters on the factory floor were expressed openly by other “lady worker.” Monica Cosens’s apprehension centered on the altered power dynamics she anticipated. She feared she might meet “injustice and insolence from a class of men by whom I had always been treated with deference, but who were now to be my masters, and if necessary would hold the rein tight.”¹³ An unnamed volunteer interviewed by the Daily Record as she entered the factory for the first time is disarmingly frank in her expression of similar fears: “‘I hope the girls won’t hate us,’ said one of the workers a little dubiously; ‘but we’ll soon get to know them, and I’m sure we shall like them’.”¹⁴ Emerging immediately after the Shell Crisis of 1915, the scheme to recruit lady munition workers was largely a propagandist publicity exercise designed to improve the public mood and assuage fears about the shell shortage.¹⁵ As I have suggested, the wartime press made much of the scheme and journalists had fun with incongruous spectacle of ladies motoring in for their shifts. The upshot of this was that some of these middle- and upper-middle-class workers were made suddenly aware of their class in a way that was unnerving. This is not so much to do with being in the minority – many, if not all, of the scheme’s recruits would have had quantities of domestic servants that outnumbered their families – as with encountering working-class women in a new setting. Deborah Thom points out that while at the beginning of the war women working in service were familiar with the most intimate details of their employers’ lives, middle-and upper-class women knew very little about the women who worked for them.¹⁶ The nameless volunteer goes further than either Warner or Cosens in not simply being conscious of her class but admitting it is a class that might be hated.

Warner is prey to the same set of anxieties around class in her article, although she deals with them less frankly than the nameless volunteer and more artfully than Cosens. She does this partly through a campaign of literary and cultural allusion that becomes startling in her descriptions of the working-class women she works with:

I watched them at first with interest, then, having tried to make friends, with affection. It was easy to get to know them: they were no shyer than sparrows, and had, in common with those unappreciated birds, an unending flow of chaff and cheerful banalities. I admired their physique – their vigorous movements, their loud voices, their plentiful hair – and I wondered, with an oblique consideration of William James how much their good health and good spirits were due to the constant rattle of smartness and vitality that their particular type entails on them. Convertentur ad vesperam: et famen patientur, ut canes, et circuibunt civitatem. Answering the strident challenges of the town they live in, they go to rinks and cinemas, they read and chatter, kiss and quarrel, and follow new fashions and new ideas as new fashions and new ideas are purveyed to the manufacturing town. As far as the cinema and the ha’penny press can make them so, they are up to date: in that measure of life afforded to them they are alive. (196)

There is a lot going on here and it is difficult to gauge Warner’s tone. At the outset it is observational, almost sociological. Warner’s insistence that “it was easy to get to know them” wards off the problem of middle-class women’s ignorance of working women’s lives. The patronizing comparison of the women to chattering sparrows suggests they are all a “particular type,” a phrase Warner later uses. It is possible to read this passage with its not so oblique reference to William James and lapse into Latin as playfully sending up an anthropologizing gaze, but these are also deliberate markers of erudition which remind readers of the incongruity of the “lady worker” in her factory setting. Through the reference to James, Warner also appears to be pitting her own variety of intellectual “up-to-dateness” – here on the latest thinking in psychology – against the debased variety her co-workers lay claim to – the cinema and “ha-penny press.”

Yet there is interest as well as dismissiveness. Warner’s description of her “up-to-date” co-workers responds to the woman munition worker as “powerful symbol of modernity” in the popular imagination at that moment. Woollacott describes the fascination with the figure of the “munitionette”: “who challenged the gender order through her patriotic skilled work and control of machinery, and […] undermined class differences through her increased spending power.”¹⁷ It is significant that better-paid factory work represented a preferable option for working-class women to the drudgery and servility of a life in domestic service and it often involved moving away from home and living independently. This sense of the munition worker’s mobility and modernity is clear in the passage. Warner imagines her pursuing her leisure at rinks and the cinema and the “constant rattle” of her personality is identified with the speed of her urban life and her relationship with the machinery she operates.

Despite her best efforts and a superior conclusion – “in that measure of life afforded to them they are alive” – Warner makes the lives of her working-class colleagues sound exciting. Her account of their reading, quarreling and affection for each other conveys a sororal intimacy. Something like longing operates beneath the surface of this po-faced account that demands we revisit and re-examine the nature of Warner’s detached tone. It registers a sense of superiority certainly, but perhaps also an awareness of her position outside a set of possibilities and relationships open to other regular munition workers. As an only child educated at home and brought up at a boy’s boarding school, Warner had grown up with few opportunities for socializing with female peers.

Monica Cosens’s book, Lloyd George’s Munition Girls (1916), which was published a few months after Warner’s article, is a more wide-eyed account her work at the Vickers’ factory and not charged with the same level of unease as Warner’s article. It opens, “Oh! I wanted – wanted more than anything else in the world to become a ‘Miss Tommy Atkins’ in Lloyd George’s army of Shell-workers,” and continues to detail her experiences of shell-turning, eating in the YMCA canteen, getting used to working-class idiom all with the same excitement.¹⁸ Cosens, like Warner, engages with the “Khaki Girls” reputation for up-to-date-ness in her descriptions of her colleagues. The parallels with Warner’s article are revealing. A chapter called “I – ngel!” – Cosens’ phonetic attempt at her colleagues’ cockney pronunciation of Angel – is dedicated to an account of a popular woman hand of that name. At one point Angel shares some new photo portraits she has had taken with the factory cook, with whom she is a favorite: “Mrs. Brown looked at them with criticism born of love. ‘I down't like those two. Ah! that's the one for me,' she said as she came to the last. ‘That's caught yer proper. It mikes yer look the lidy.’”¹⁹ Cosens’s toe-curling but not unendearing anecdote registers some of the longing for sororal closeness and conspiracy that we see in Warner’s account. It also stages the munition worker’s claims on modernity and her potential social mobility. That the photos are shared on the bus and that Mrs Brown’s prefers a photo in which Angel is at her most lady-like makes this point amply.

The lavish care Cosens takes over her account of Angel’s appearance is worthy of attention.

She was the prettiest of all the Khaki girls I had seen, for many of the factory hands are extraordinarily attractive. Her brown hair was short and curly, her mouth had a delightful curl at the corners; there was a tilt to her retroussé nose, and her laughing grey eyes were large and set apart. I have never seen anyone more alive, nor more smiling, for her red lips were never closed but always parted in a curve, showing her short white teeth.²⁰

Cosens’ insistence she’s “never seen anyone more alive” than Angel echoes Warner’s grudging concession that her working-class colleagues are “alive.” This word choice is striking. While on the surface it is used to indicate the women’s animation and activity it also suggests their responsiveness, not simply their aliveness but their aliveness to the modern world around them – a world of ideas, cinemas, photography. Clearly the use of “alive” here reminds us of its opposite, to be dead, like the many young men who left their jobs in factories and went to fight.

The deadly function of the shells she produces is something Warner engages with, albeit ambivalently, in her article. The finishing of the shells is made to sound like the “finishing” of a young lady – “slim and polished, they went off to be filled, discreet of curve, demure of colour.” Warner’s feminized description of the shell, particularly her attention to its “slim” shape, “discreet of curve,” recalls the care that Cosens takes over describing Angel’s good looks – the curl of her hair and mouth, the tilt of her nose, her laughing eyes. The parallels continue as Warner imagines these “Quakerish instruments of death” on their final journey “alive and voiced at last […] shrieking over the trenches” (195). The use of “alive” here to describe the shells combined with Warner’s alignment of the munitions with their female creators registers an anxiety about the consequences of women’s munitions work that her blasé tone belies. Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield’s work on the testimony of women munition workers reveals the degree to which some were troubled by the fact they were making weapons that would take men’s lives, one woman writing: “on the whole my experience, such as it has been, in a munition factory has been a bright and happy one. Only for the fact that I am using my lifes (sic) energy to destroy human souls, gets on my verves.”²¹ This anonymous worker probes the same painful contrast that Cosens and Warner address in their pointed use of the word “alive,” her own “energy” being used to “destroy human souls.” Cosens’s and Warner’s emphasis on the vitality of regular munitions workers might also be read as encoding some of the public criticism that gathered around the figure of the “munitionette.” While “Miss Tommy Atkins” was admired for her patriotic fervor and her grit she was also lambasted for her immodest embrace of her increased spending power – the popular press ran endless articles about munitionettes with fur coats – and was for many a figure that represented a disturbing threat to the social order.²²

Nonetheless, Warner and Cosens both attempt to put distance between themselves and other “Miaows,” the term used by regular shell workers for middle- and upper-class recruits. Warner reproofs them for their collective decision to remain on friendly but aloof relations with the male mechanics in the factory. Cosens has a whole chapter detailing superior Miaow behavior and advising new “War Volunteers” on how to avoid it. Part of the appeal for women like Warner and Cosens who registered for Moir and Cowan’s scheme was the promise of doing real patriotic work and perhaps the appeal of some of the “munitionette’s” glamorous modernity rubbing off on them.²³ The last thing any of them would have wanted was to be considered a Miaow.

Wachman has suggested that Warner’s Blackwood’s article “indicates her increasing detachment from the values of the class she grew up in.”²⁴ Warner’s ambivalent treatment of the regular munition workers suggests the picture is a bit more mixed. While Warner reproduces stock motifs of the “coltish” “munitionette” in her article – here competing for the mirror in the locker room, there comparing overtime pay on her way out of the factory – her concluding remarks reveal an interest in the reality of these women’s working lives that this patter belies. She comments on the way the scarcity of small tools for shell work and the poor ventilation of the factory affects the regular worker’s mental and physical wellbeing. She suggests that fatigue and “fainting fits” could be avoided were a little more money spent. She also recognizes the very different nature of her work as a temporary relief worker to that of the “jaded workgirl” who engages in tiring overtime for economic reasons. She writes: “I am not doing it for a livelihood, but if I were, I doubt I should think it good pay.” This remark is amongst the most telling in the article. Aged twenty-three and keen for independence, the best way of making a “livelihood” was on Warner’s mind in 1916. The very fact of her involvement with the munitions scheme and her pitching of her article to Blackwood’s evidence this. When writing about her munitions work and her article later in 1939, Warner’s memories focus on the fee she received and how this compared with her wage from Vickers’: “a magazine paid me sixteen guineas for [the article], an interesting comparison with the six shillings odd (if I got the shilling bonus) for an eight-hour shift.”²⁵ When a daily newspaper subsequently asked Warner to contribute a short piece about poor factory conditions she was unimpressed by the suggestion she should write it for free:

The MS was acknowledged in a letter that remarked that, since the object of the article was to better the lot of munition workers, they felt sure they need not offer me payment. I replied that it would not better the condition of any workers to write commissioned articles for nothing. They saw the force of this, and paid.²⁶

The young Warner’s resistance to being cast as a hobbyist or having her writing considered anything other than work is significant.²⁷ The authoritative, self-consciously professional voice she adopts in the article is also evidence of this preoccupation with her status as a worker. But as well as being marked by Warner’s interest in what it meant to earn your own living, the article is also characterized by her efforts to hold this knowledge, along with an acknowledgment of class difference, at bay. While the dispute over her fee in the passage above is colored by Warner’s communist commitments of 1939, its phrasing recalls some of this willed ignorance: Warner was clearly more interested in what was due to her as a professional writer than what are generalized here as the “conditions of any workers.” In the discussion of Lolly Willowes that follows, I suggest that the structural realities that Warner parried in the article are analyzed with an uncanny eye in her first novel.

Lolly Willowes (1926): contexts and criticism

Later in 1916, after her time at the munitions factory in Erith, Warner’s father died suddenly. The prospect of living alone with her mother in rural Devon sharpened her desire to find work that would enable her to live independently. This came in the form of her role as co-researcher on the Carnegie Trust funded project on Tudor Church Music in 1917, secured for her by her music teacher and lover, Percy Buck. Her salary of three pounds a week funded her move to London where she lived in a flat above a furrier in Bayswater.²⁸ The progress Warner made in her independent working life after the war is in contrast to the experiences of working-class women munition workers, the majority of whom returned to indoor domestic service as they “were displaced by 1919–1920 by demobilised soldiers.”²⁹ While reform in 1919 allowed some middle-class women access to the professions, Arthur McIvor suggests there is little evidence that the WWI “constituted a major watershed in the position of women within British society,” particularly in terms of their working lives.³⁰ Published ten years after her Blackwood’s article and the start of her self-supporting life in London, Warner’s first novel is animated by concerns about women’s work and agency and the relationship between them.

Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman charts the life of Laura Willowes, the only daughter of a gentry family. After an atypically relaxed childhood and adolescence, Laura is expected move to her brother’s London home after her doting father’s death. There she lives for years the life of a spinster aunt, making herself useful to her sister-in-law and nieces. In 1921 Laura leaves behind her nullifying London life, much to her family’s dismay, moving to the unpromising-sounding village of Great Mop in the Chilterns. There she enters a compact with the Devil and realizes her vocation as a witch. From this potted account of the plot the anti-patriarchal critique at work in Lolly Willowes is evident and much critical attention has been paid to the nature of Warner’s feminism in the novel.³¹ Warner’s engagement with class and labor in Lolly Willowes has attracted less attention. This is partly to do with readerly expectations of the “woman’s novel” of the period, a category into which Lolly Willowes arguably falls. Written by middle-class women for other middle-class women, large scale critiques of structural inequalities have been seen to fall outside the largely domestic purview of this genre.³² The degree to which the character of Laura Willowes has been central to existing readings of the novel and treated as its heroine has also informed a neglect of the novel’s class politics. Critics have tended to be interested in her gender rather than her class and this has meant that the “politics” of the novel have sometimes been taken to mean the same thing as its gender or sexual politics.³³ In what follows I suggest that approaching Lolly Willowes through her Blackwood’s essay is a productive way of drawing attention to the questions of class and work in the novel.

Discreet service: Dunlop, Satan and the beech leaf

Lolly Willowes is a domestic novel, albeit an uncanny one. The life of Laura Willowes depends, as it did for all women of her class, upon the labor of servants and this is something Warner interrogates in detail in her novel, particularly its first, pre-war section. In his influential reading of the novel, John Lucas argues for the radical political implications of its fantasy elements, suggesting its rejection of the “realist mode” used to narrate the first section of the book amounts to a rejection of Laura’s brother’s “reactionary politics, together with his capitalist sense of value.”³⁴ Laura’s move to Great Mop and her life as a witch should not be read as “spectacularly individual” or “escapist” but a visionary statement of what might be possible if life were lived in a different way.³⁵ This argument is convincing and importantly ties Lolly Willowes to the historical moment in which it was published when radical political change seemed increasingly possible. What concerns me in this reading is that Part One must, in effect, be sacrificed to preserve Lucas’s sense of progress from the “reassuringly realist” to the radical and political. There are risks involved in this reading, not least because Warner asks us at various points later in the novel to recall Part One and not simply to congratulate Laura on her escape from Apsley Terrace and the trappings of bourgeois life. Likewise, Lucas’s presentation of the realism of the first section as “reassuring” is misleading. Reassuring for whom – the novel’s readers or its characters? There is little to be found there that is reassuring for the reader and this becomes clear if we pay attention to the way domestic arrangements at Apsley are presented.

Take the following description of Laura’s life in her brother’s home:

When she awoke, the day was already begun. She could hear iron noises from the kitchen, the sound of yesterday’s ashes being probed out. Then came the smell of wood smoke – the kitchen fire had been laid anew and kindled in the cleansed grate. This was followed by the automatic noise of the carpet-sweeper and, breaking in upon it, the irregular knocking of the staircase brush against the banisters. The maid who brought her morning tea and laid the folded towel across the hot-water can had an experienced look; when she drew back the curtains she looked out upon the day with no curiosity. She had seen it already.³⁶

The disorientating quality of this passage has several sources. It begins in media res but it is unclear for whom the day “was already begun.” Warner deliberately delays telling us explicitly and the human agent engaged in the work described remains mysteriously missing. We encounter the progress of the “day” partially via a series of sounds and smells as they reach Laura, still in her bed. The narrator, in true omniscient, realist style, supplies details for the reader that Laura could not be certain of from her vantage point, for instance that the “iron noises” she hears are the sounds of “yesterday’s ashes being probed out.” The two perspectives – Laura’s limited one and the narrator’s omniscient one – vie for position in the following sentence with the dash indicating the switch between them: “Then came the smell of wood smoke – the kitchen fire had been laid anew and kindled in the cleansed grate.” The effect of this is a sense of the partialness, the limitations of Laura’s point of view and the paragraph closes with a barb directed at her. It is little wonder the maid had an “experienced look,” given the amount of work that has undertaken before Laura has even had her morning tea or received her hot water. The final ambiguous observation about the maid’s failure of curiosity about the day outside for “She had seen it already” reinforces this criticism. It is likely the maid has encountered the “day” a number of hours earlier, perhaps when she was disposing of “yesterday’s ashes.” The implication of this curt sentence might also be that such is the deadening routine of her menial work, for the maid one day looks much like another. Through her play with point of view and deployment of such ambiguities in this passage, Warner makes strange the domestic arrangements at Apsley Terrace. There is something séance-like about this passage with its “automatic noise” and “irregular knocking.” Warner draws attention to the oddness of Laura’s partial understanding of, or at the very least her indifference to, the work going on in the house.

She continues to employ these strategies in the following paragraph:

By the time the Willowes family met breakfast all this activity had disappeared like the tide from the smooth, garnished beach. For the rest of the day it functioned unnoticed. Bells were answered, meals were served, all that appeared was completion. Yet unseen and underground the preparation and demolition of every day went on, like the inward persistent workings of heart and entrails. Sometimes a crash, a banging door, a voice upraised, would rend the veil of impersonality. And sometimes a sound of running water at unusual hours and a faint steaminess in the upper part of the house betokened that one of the servants was having a bath. (41)

This passage suggests that the supernatural is not confined to Great Mop and the latter parts of Lolly Willowes. The “unseen” servants, their labor made invisible by the near magical way in which everything that “appears was completion” anticipates the fantastical happenings later in the book, for instance the appearance of Lolly’s familiar, Vinegar the kitten, as if from nowhere. The fact that servants are also noticeable by the occasional sounds or “faint steaminess in the upper part of the house” and not as physical presences prophetically points to the importance of powerful but invisible forces later in the novel.

The influence of Warner’s experiences at Vickers’ factory is also identifiable here. The house is at once compared to a body and a machine through a language of productivity – “persistent workings,” “functioning.” The invisibility of the Willowes’ domestic servants and the “impersonality” they carefully preserve in the house compare interestingly with Warner’s account of working with machinery: “The work of a shell machinist has an obliterating effect upon one’s sense of individuality: however monotonous, it is exacting; it has to be attended to. After a while it begins to flatten one into the essential dough: every shell thieves a little of one’s pride of self” (193). When Laura moves to Apsley Terrace she is described in terms of her role in this machine: a “sort of extra wheel, [she] soon found herself part of the mechanism, and, interworking with the other wheels” (40). In the mind of Mr Arbuthnot, her one-time suitor, she is imaginatively identified with the Willowes’ efficient domestic staff: “His aunt, Lady Ross-Price always tried to get servants from the Willowes establishment, for Mrs Willowes trained them so well. Mr Arbuthnot supposed that Mrs Willowes would be equally good at training wives” (48). Be this as it may, Warner does not collapse the experiences of patriarchy endured by the Willowes’ domestic servants and those felt by Laura. At points we see that despite the oppression she encounters at Apsley Terrace she is complicit in that visited upon other women, as in this episode with Dunlop.

The stairs creaked under the tread of Dunlop with the hot-water can. Dunlop entered, glancing neither at Laura curled askew on the bed nor at the chrysanthemums ennobling the dressing-table. She was a perfectly trained servant. Before she left the room she took a deep breath, stooped down, and picked up the beech leaf.

Quarter of an hour afterwards Laura exclaimed: “Oh’! a windmill!” She took up the guide-book again, and began to read intently! (76)

This incident takes place the evening that Laura has had her important experience buying chrysanthemums in the “half florist half greengrocer” (72) and purchased the guidebook and map of the Chilterns that will lead her to Great Mop.³⁷ It is significant that this moment should coincide with the peculiar, pointed appearance of Dunlop. The fantastic hallmarks of class relations in the novel are discernible again as Laura and Dunlop appear invisible to each other – Dunlop’s perfection as a servant, it is made clear, depends upon this quality. Laura appears not to notice Dunlop’s picking up of the stray beech leaf she has left on the floor, in spite of her “deep breath,” and the reader is meant to notice Laura not noticing, Warner ensures this with an abrupt paragraph break and a new paragraph starting fifteen minutes later with Laura’s mind quite elsewhere. Warner draws our attention to Laura’s disinterest in Dunlop and suggests their disparity of opportunity, physically registered in Dunlop stooping and Laura “curled askew on the bed.”

But did Laura really not notice Dunlop pick up the beech leaf? Events later in Great Mop suggest she may well have. Dunlop appears on Laura’s rather haphazard Christmas list and is purchased a gift of a “useful button-hook.” It is worth noting that it is a “useful” rather than a decorative buttonhook, befitting Dunlop’s station and echoing her own perfection in the area of usefulness. A buttonhook would indeed be helpful gift for an ageing family retainer, finding it increasingly difficult to stoop but still accustomed to wearing dated button-up boots. The gift suggests Laura may after all have noticed Dunlop in her room that evening and her struggle when she stooped to pick up the beech leaf, but the buttonhook also implies that there is something outdated, something backwards even, about the relationship between the two women.

Dunlop makes one final appearance in the novel that again recalls the episode with the beech leaf. Vinegar’s various malicious attempts to get rid of Laura’s nephew, Titus, who has settled in Great Mop, have failed but she is confident that Satan’s strategies will be more successful:

There would be no catastrophe, no pantechnicon displays of flood or fire. He would proceed discreetly and surely, like a gamekeeper going his rounds by night; he would remove Titus as imperturbably as Dunlop had removed the beech-leaf. She could sit back quite comfortably now, and wait for it would happen. (176)

Laura’s imaginative association of Satan’s discreet service with that of Dunlop and the fact that she can “sit back quite comfortably,” just as she lay “curled” on her bed in Apsley Terrace, suggests that her move to Great Mop has not engendered any real destabilization of the social order.³⁸ In spite of her consciousness of the violence “Society” (124) has done her, Laura still thinks fondly about and is relieved at the prospect of herself being served. Critics have been perplexed by the apparent incompatibility of the feminist politics of the novel and Laura’s willingness to accept Satan as her master and act as his servant.³⁹ That Satan appears to her as a game keeper and in her mind occupies the same place as Dunlop perhaps implies that Laura is confident he is not her master nor she his servant but the reverse. Her manner of speaking to him, especially at the close of the novel suggests this. When they meet at Maulgrave’s Folly, Laura is forthright, even cross, accusing Satan of participating in the mockery of the deluded aristocrat responsible for the site. By contrast Satan appears as a “gardener” (187) and addresses Laura as “ma’am.” Laura later describes Satan as a “mysterious Master,” to which he tellingly replies: “You seem to me a rather an exacting servant. I have shaped myself like a jobbing gardener, I am sitting on the grass beside you […] I am doing everything in my power to be agreeable and reassuring … what more do you want?” (192). That Satan assumes the appearance of people belonging to a lower class than Laura to make himself “agreeable and reassuring” goes some way to reinforcing what I have suggested about her attachment to the protocols of class. The Devil plays on Laura’s native sense of superiority and this is evident in her thoughts immediately after they part ways: “Very probably he was quite stupid. When she had asked him about death he had got up and gone away, which looked as if he did not know much more about it than she did herself” (201).

Conclusion: at Mrs Leak’s table

In his reading of Naomi Mitchison’s novel, We Have Been Warned, Nick Hubble argues for the importance of the cross-class encounter. Taking as an example a moment when Mitchison’s heroine announces her political kinship with an unemployed hitch-hiker, “telling him ‘I’m Red, too’,” Hubble suggests that for Mitchison “intersubjective” relationships are shown to have the capacity to challenge class feeling as well as a “more ontological bourgeois sense of the unity of the self.”⁴⁰ Mitchison’s heroine comes away from this fleeting encounter with a deeper knowledge of herself. Warner, like Mitchison, is interested in the cross-class encounter but it is the failure of these moments to generate meaningful change or understanding that preoccupy her and that are central to her critique of class and gender structures in Lolly Willowes.

Laura’s priggish judgment of Devil – “very probably he was quite stupid” – after their extended conversation can be read as one of these failed cross-class encounters and so too can her interactions with Dunlop and the maid at Apsley Terrace. Even her nights of “indoor pleasantness” with Mrs Leak are depicted as not being quite of the egalitarian character they first appear. Warner never loses sight of the way class mediates in these moments:

After that Laura was given every evening a glass of home-made wine: dandelion, cowslip, elderberry, ash key, or mangold. By her appreciation and her enquiries she entrapped Mrs Leak into pausing longer and longer before she carried away the supper-tray. Before January was out it had become an established thing that after placing the bedroom candlestick on the cleared table Mrs Leak would sit down and talk for half an hour or so.

Mrs Leak’s duties are pushed to the peripheries of the narrative here, but Warner keeps them just in sight – the carrying away for the “supper-tray” and the “cleared table.” All the physical action that takes place is Mrs Leak’s but still it is Laura who can “entrap” her landlady via “appreciation” and “enquiries.” The imbalance, which we get a whisper of in this passage, becomes more apparent if we pay attention to the subject of Mrs Leak’s “talk” and Laura’s reception of it.

“Mrs Leak’s favourite subject was the Misses Larpent” and their home Lazzard Court, where she was in service before she married. The minuteness of Mrs Leak’s familiarity with these aristocratic sisters – what they ate, spent their money on, the way they doled out punishments to their employees in “the Justice Room” (101) – hints at the daily realities of the lives of servants that are elsewhere absent from the novel. The detailed nature of Mrs Leak’s memories of her employers and their home reminds us of Deborah Thom’s remarks about the ontological shortfall between upper-class women and their servants. This imbalance is also clear for us to see in Laura’s responses to Mrs Leak’s account:

She [Mrs Leak] knew the house inside and out, and described it to Laura till Laura felt that there was not one of the fourteen principal bedrooms she did not know. The blue room, the yellow room, the Chinese Room, the buff room, the balcony room, the needle-work room – she had slept in them all. Nay, she had awakened in the Royal bed, and pulling aside the red damask curtains had looked to the window to see the sun shining upon the tulip tree. (100)

Mrs Leak’s account of service at Lazzard Court is transfigured in Laura’s imagination into her own leisured experience of the rooms of the house. While it was Mrs Leak’s job to turn down quilts and lay fires in the many bedrooms of Lazzard Court, by humorous contrast, Laura’s class means she can only go so far as imagining that “she had slept in them all.” By the end of the passage, we get the distinct impression that Laura may have altogether stopped following Mrs Leak, entering into her own fantasy of sleeping in the Royal bed and gazing out of the window. This moment recalls and reworks the episode with the maid at Apsley Terrace who “when she drew back the curtains […] looked out upon the day with no curiosity.” Warner reminds us of the ways in which class delimits and circumscribes a woman’s point of view, but she makes this point at Laura’s expense as she seems unaware of or disinterested in this fact. Her view of the people of Great Mop reinforces this:

After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was to remain outside the secret, whatever it was. She had not come to Great Mop to concern herself with the hearts of men. (106)

We might assume that what separates Laura from the villagers in these pre-conversation days is her knowledge of the witchy nature of Great Mop. But at various points in the novel Warner suggests that the realities of class difference are also unfathomable to her. Like the youthful Warner in her Blackwood’s article, Laura holds at bay “the secret, whatever it was.” But as we have seen, Warner’s attention to the work of domestic servants throughout the novel insists on class as an open secret. In his consideration of class in Lolly Willowes, Peter Swaab asks whether we are invited by the novel’s narrator to “blame” her for her political “naivety.” He suggests that while it is sometimes “unclear how far Laura and the narrator take the same view about the appeal of quiescence […] Warner’s narrative never decisively dissociates itself from Laura.”⁴¹ I would suggest that this disassociation or criticism is identifiable precisely in the gaps in Laura’s understanding that I have explored in this article. It is present in the slips in her interactions with working-class characters – ignoring Dunlop and only half-listening to Mrs Leak. Swaab is right that the novel does not “press Laura into socio-political exemplariness” but the narrator’s alertness to where she falls short suggests the idea of potential “exemplariness” in these areas is not done away with altogether.

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Clara Jones

Clara Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at King's College London and the author of Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh: EUP, 2016). Her current research focuses on the political commitments and literary practice of British interwar women writers and activists, including Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ellen Wilkinson, Rosamond Lehmann and Amabel Williams-Ellis. Clara has a monograph, Class, Gender, Genre: British Interwar Women Writers, and the edited collection, Virginia Woolf and Capitalism, both forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

Notes

1 Warner, “The Way I Have Come,” 3.

2 Robin Hackett suggests that the article “critiques middle-class views of working-women’s lives as ‘picturesque’ from the point of view of a temporary, middle-class, factory worker” (Sapphic Primitivism, 88) while Gay Wachman discovers in the article the roots of Warner’s “lifelong consciousness of the manifold evils of the class system” (Lesbian Empire, 31).

3 For a discussion of “the effect of Warner's national service – first voluntary, then mandatory – on her writing” during World War Two, particularly its influence on the politics of women’s work in her novel of medieval convent life, The Corner That Held Them (1948) see Micir, “Not of National Importance,” 66.

4 Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend, 41.

5 Ibid., 180.

6 Ibid., 2.

7 The Herald, July 24, 1915, 14.

8 Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend, 40.

9 Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 42.

10 Warner, “Behind the Firing Line,” 191. All further references will appear in the main text.

11 Hackett, Sapphic Primitivism, 88.

12 Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 15–44; Randall, “Telling the Day,” 243–66.

13 Cosens, Lloyd George's Munition Girls, 8.

14 Daily Record, Wednesday July 21, 1915, 5.

15 Baillie, “The Women of Red Clydeside,” 78–80.

16 Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Women, 13.

17 Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend, 3.

18 Cosens, Lloyd George’s Munition Girls, 7.

19 Ibid., 55.

20 Ibid., 52.

21 Braybon and Summerfield, Out of the Cage, 64–5.

22 Ibid., 71.

23 Baillie, “The Women of Red Clydeside,” 79.

24 Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 74.

25 Warner, “The Way I Have Come,” 3.

26 Ibid.

27 Writing on the same topic Wendy Mulford notes that: “Hard-headedness about money, and [Warner’s] realization that as an upper-class woman she was ‘presumably subsidized but unpayable’, were to remain central features of her outlook as a writer for the rest of her life: they provide an illuminating pointer towards one basis of her Marxism.” This Narrow Place, 53.

28 Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner, 38.

29 McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 187.

30 McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 186.

31 See Nesbitt, “Footsteps of Red Ink,” 449–71; Garrity, Step-Daughters of England; Shin, “Lolly Willowes and the Arts of Dispossession,” 709–25; Marcus, “A Wilderness of One’s Own.”

32 Beauman, A Very Great Profession, 4.

33 This is not the whole picture; in an essay on rural novels Marion Shaw notes the way class mediates Laura’s experiences as a woman (“Cold Comfort Times,” 73–86) and Mary Jacobs’ excellent essay on Warner’s use of pastoral conventions remarks on her work’s “preoccupation with the lie of the land and the representation of its common people interacting with – or acted upon by – their masters and ‘betters’.” “Sylvia Townsend Warner,” 61–82 (61).

34 Lucas, “From Realism to Radicalism,” 203–23 (206).

35 Ibid.,208.

36 Warner, Lolly Willowes, 40–1. All further references will appear in the main text.

37 Critics have read much into this moment, seeing it as turning point in the novel (Marcus, “A Wilderness of One’s Own,” 155; Lucas, “From Realism to Radicalism,” 206). Laura’s rhapsodic imaginings about the greengrocer’s sister “picking fruit in a darkening orchard” tend to be the focus of these readings while less attention is paid to the greengrocer himself. When Laura decides she will buy all three chrysanthemums the narrator tells us: “He was pleased. He did not expect such a good customer at this hour” (74). This interjection punctures Laura’s musings and reminds the reader of the transactional nature of the exchange. The “sprays of beech leaves” that accompany the flowers, the greengrocer explains are “thrown in with her purchase” (74). Why does Warner draw attention to the greengrocer’s parallel, but emphatically earthbound and prosaic concerns? As with the incurious maid, this is part of an effort to draw attention to the specificity of Laura’s (classed) point of view and call into question its neutrality.

38 Peter Swaab is attentive to the ways in which Warner’s “depiction of Great Mop” is “hedged around with skepticism” particularly in terms of the way that the class relations of the village are figured (“The Queerness of Lolly Willowes,” 40).

39 J Lawrence Mitchell is one such critic, writing: “There is something […] troubling about the logic of Laura’s relationship with Satan […] in accepting the Devil as her Master, has she not jumped from the frying pan into the fire?” (“In Another Country,” 127). Marcus gets around the “problem” by emphasising “witch-hood” as a “vocation” Laura has “elected” herself (“A Wilderness of One’s Own,” 155). She goes on to read Warner’s version of Satan as a utopian feminist “solution” in and of itself: “the creation of Eros, the devil, the green-world lover who protects the heroine without the sex/death power struggle of Harriet Hume, is the woman artist’s hope” (157). Garrity suggests that Satan is a “feminized figure, a homosexual signifier”: “Satan is Lolly’s double to the extent that he represents her repressed lesbianism, for from the outset it is he who has been the stimulus, guiding her away from her role as London spinster, and, with the ‘sweet persuasions’ of a lover, easing her into her subversive calling as a witch” (Step-Daughters of England, 175).

40 Hubble, The Proletarian Answer, 15.

41 Swaab, “The Queerness of Lolly Willowes,” 41–2.