Lolly Willowes

I have just finished my column about Warner’s Lolly Willowes. I’ll post a longer version in a couple of weeks after it is published. It really is a great novel, and deserves more attention (you can buy the latest (if 10 years old) Virago edition on Amazon, there’s a search box below, hinthint). Warner, too, is someone that deserves a whole lot more attention. She was a lesbian communist biographer poet novelist, who also wrote a guidebook to Somerset. What a great lady. Her seven novels are relatively easy to find in libraries or booksites. She also wrote a large number of short stories.

 

She was for a long time the lover of Valentine Ackland, a relatively unconsidered poet and another worthy of our attention. They wrote poems together, publishing Whether a Dove or Seagull in 1934 (an article about Ackland is here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1778230,00.html and one of her lovely poems is here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/poetry/story/0,,1778987,00.html).