SOURCE: Knoll, Bruce. “‘An Existence Doled Out’: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes.” Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (fall 1993): 344-63.

In the following essay, Knoll perceives Lolly Willowes as a novel that explores the dualism between male aggression and female passivity.

Sylvia Townsend Warner begins with her first novel, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, written in 1926, to break down the dualism between aggressiveness and passivity. This dualism is couched in terms of a masculine versus a feminine approach to life, neither of which Townsend Warner accepts, because the masculine/feminine opposition in the novel is a creation of patriarchal society. J. Lawrence Mitchell notes, “As a group, men do not fare very well in Lolly Willowes” (54), and neither do any masculine values. Townsend Warner extends this duality to the prevailing social structure of London in and around the time of World War...