Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
“She felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand.… She forgot that she was in London. She forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her finger seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left of their singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot…
When he brought her the change from her pound note and the chrysanthemums pinned up in sheets of white paper he brought also several sprays of beech leaves. These, he explained, were thrown in with her purchase. Laura took them into her arms. The great fans of orange tracery seemed to her even more beautiful than the chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were surprise. She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods, like the woods to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination.”
If you’ve spent enough time around me—on social media, as a friend, as a colleague—you have heard me on Lolly1. So if you need to tune me out on this time around, I completely understand.
But for those who’ve never heard the spiel, or need to hear it again: Lolly Willowes is one of the books that actually helped cement my principle of “seasonal” and “embodied reading” in the first place. It is, bar none, the perfect October read,2 not just because its so delightfully witchy, but because autumn itself—in the passage I quote above, and in others—is a catalyst in the book’s plot.
Just a tiny fragment of autumn, for the unforgettable, eponymous Lolly, is what the archaic torso of Apollo was to Rilke: a sudden encounter with something totally divorced from its original context put so alive with power that can only be interpreted as “You must change your life.”
Lolly’s creator, Sylvia Townsend Warner, was a lesbian communist scholar of Anglican church music whom I am extremely disappointed that I’ll never get to invite to dinner, as she lived from 1893-1978. Warner did manage to fill those 85 years to the brim, though: as a scholar of Sacred English music; as the beloved of her partner, Valentine Ackland (with whom she is buried in Chaldon Herring, Dorset); as a Marxist activist; and as a novelist of wonderful breadth and strangeness, though still best known for her debut novel Lolly Willowes, which published in 1926.
But I’m ahead of myself. Lolly Willowes, the character, is a “useful surplus woman”—a maiden aunt who was valued for her utility in raising her nieces and nephews and who discovers as she enters the autumn of one particular year and of her own life that her brother has embezzled her small inheritance that was left in his care.
Lolly obviously still has enormous privilege in nevertheless being able to move out of her brother’s house at this point, and to move to that part of the countryside that captivated her imagination in that one moment in the florist’s shop. But it’s not a full-room-of-one’s-own privilege that Lolly hoped it would be. Economic concerns means she has to get a roommate, and just as through most of her life as a maiden aunt, Lolly enjoys very little domestic privacy.
What unfolds from there is the magic, the craft: Lolly finds a way to make the whole countryside—the woods, the hills, the sky itself—a room of her own. Lolly, unlike other “plucky women,” doesn’t enter this room of her own to write, or to paint, or to make a beautiful garden. Lolly, at age forty-seven, moves away from home and walks out into the woods simply to be and to feel really good.
And is the stranger whom Lolly meets in the woods actually Satan? You’ll have to decide for yourself.
Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall & Illustrated by Barbara Cooney
From before my earliest memory, there was Ox-Cart Man. I’m not sure who gave me the book, but from the age of three, I would beg to have it read to me again and again.
In October he backed his ox into his cart
and he and his family filled it up
with everything they made or grew all year long
that was leftover.
Those are the first words of the book—from the first, our protagonist is nameless: “he.” From the first, his partnership with his Ox, the one who will pull the cart to market, is tender; in almost every illustration, their bodies touch.
Ox-Cart Man, written by one Donald Hall, one of the great American poets of the 20th century, continues in this spare vein, spread across long, thin landscape layout paintings by Barbara Cooney. They live in some unspecified moment of historic New England, in an economy where bartering and subsistence were a cornerstones.
The book manages to be a litany of the seasons, of different handicrafts, of packing for a trip, of a shopping spree, even. Like a litany, and like farming or handicraft or travel, its sense of abundance and beauty is cumulative:
He packed a bag of wool
he sheared from the sheep in April.
He packed a shawl his wife wove on a loom
from yarn spun on the spinning wheel
from sheep sheared in April.
He packed five pairs of mittens his daughter knit
from yarn spun on the spinning wheel
from sheep sheared in April.
Ox-Cart Man and his Ox walk for ten days to a market town, where they part. Ox-Cart man walks home alone through a notably more leafless landscape, carrying a pack over his shoulder full of things his family cannot make for themselves, another delicious, Christmas-morning-like litany: (an iron kettle, a needle, a knife, peppermint candies).
Ox-Cart Man arrives home, and gathers round the new kettle over the fire with his wife, daughter, and son. They all take up their needles as the snow begins to fall, and they begin the cycle again.
On Persephone’s Island by Mary Taylor Simeti
Mary Taylor Simeti’s remarkable memoir, On Persephone’s Island, begins in October: both October 1962, when she first arrived in Sicily to learn from the community organizing and nonviolent resistance work that activist Danilo Dolci (1924-1997) was spearheading among Sicily’s rural poor; and October 1982, at the close of 20 years that she had never intended to spend in Sicily.
Mary, age 21, met and fell in love with a young Sicilian man, a fellow organizer, Tonino Simeti, in the early 1960s. They dreamed of traveling the world together and supporting other poor rural communities’ self-liberatory movements. Then Tonino’s older brother died. The care of elderly parents and a generations-old family farm fell in the newlyweds’ lap. Mafia violence was on the rise as more and more Sicilians dared to say that a) the Mafia existed and b) they refused to let this system of violent power control every moment and inch of their lives and allegedly democratic government.
As Simeti traces both that especially violent year of the Second Mafia War—1982-83—and the 20 years of her accidental Sicilian sojourn—1962-82—she writes with deep passion for the stories and friends she’s found in that place and in herself. She delves deep into mythology and her ambiguous identity as both Demeter-the-mother-who-stays-and-mourns and Persephone-the-daughter-who-leaves. For her, the possibility of having her children snatched from her, or even losing the abundance of the earth itself, given the Mafia’s propensity for razing the vineyards of those who crossed them, is no metaphorical threat. Sitting up late with her husband, terrified for their own farm’s and family’s safety after neighbors receive bomb threats, she echoes Demeter, raging at Hades’ mouth: “I cannot believe that this is real...that is possible to be so defenseless.”
More than anything, I am moved by the familiarity of Simeti’s descriptions of organizing for justice in community. The after-school discussion groups with teachers and fellow parents who are late and tired and overworked; the marches her teenage son organizes with his friends against state violence where the signs are misspelled; the memorial vigils for murdered activists where she’s the only one who remembered to bring candles. It’s all so quotidian and boring and imperfect and chaotic and exhausting and also it is our most sacred work, to show up for each other and for justice: “to stand up and be counted.”
Reader Recommendations
Huge thanks to Meg Bertera-Berwick who wrote to recommend A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle as a perfect October read and, of course, it is! Who could forget that incredible storm that brings Mrs Whatsit to the Murry family kitchen for cocoa:
“Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.”
Also, Meg [B-B, not Murry!] so rightly points out: “surprisingly full of genderqueerness for its time!”
About book linking: because I’m a bookseller, I’ve made book hyperlinks to the Bookshop.org storefront of the store where I work, Loganberry Books. If you have a local shop you love, I hope you’ll try to order from them first: like all communities, they are able to be there for you because you are there for them.
Also: Libraries! Libraries! I hope your library is as wonderful as mine.
I refer to what is seasonal for me in the temperate Northern hemisphere. My experience is overwhelmingly privileged/reflected in Western/Global North literature. If you are in a different environment, in the Global South or elsewhere, I would so love to hear about and share your seasons readings.