Sylvia Townsend Warner's "very cultured voice".

The urge to escape is probably as universal, and as intellectually inexplicable, as the urge to procreate. Even the richest, the most beloved, the most successful, the most powerful must occasionally long to get away from their lives. It's not really glamour or adventure one wants; it's anonymity. Driving through the further reaches of Queens, for example, or the Bronx, it often strikes me temptingly that I could change my name, rent one of these identical little houses or rooms, and disappear forever. What do we want to run away from? Habit; routine; soul-deadening daily tasks; obligatory but meaningless social engagements; mind-rotting small talk; the tyranny of family; the arbitrary jollity of holidays; the exhausting responsibilities of love itself.

It is not a subject that is treated often in fiction. One who has done it brilliantly is Sylvia Townsend Warner, the British writer who died in 1978 and was the author of seven novels and countless short stories, 153 of which were published in The New Yorker. Beginning with her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she treated the instinct for escape with a level of delicacy, humor, and respect that exposed it for what it really is: the defense of one's very soul.

Throughout her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner enjoyed success and renown, if not fame. Since her death, her work has found a home under the feminist umbrella: feminist because many of her characters were women in search of some variety of independence and also because she was a lesbian who lived openly with her long-time lover, the poet Valentine Ackland, and published their love letters after Valentine's death. But while she could fairly be called a feminist, her fiction is not, I would say, feminist so much as a plea for the freedom and integrity of every person, regardless of sex, and if she can be said to be the heir of any particular writer it would be Samuel Butler, one of the great misogynists of all time. She admitted to "reprobating" both church and family and managed to be consistently subversive to the received values of both institutions while at the same time practicing, in her own life, strict monogamy, a wide range of domestic skills, and admirable industry. In short she excelled in the bourgeois virtues while despising most bourgeois values.

Lolly Willowes, Warner's first novel, remains her best known and has recently been reissued.(1) Laura Willowes is what the young Sylvia Townsend Warner might, under slightly different circumstances, have become. An upper-middle-class country girl, Laura sees no reason to marry: she and her father are everything to one another, and she takes no interest in young men. When her father unexpectedly dies, the world as she knows it comes to an end, and, being an old-fashioned girl and not in the habit of questioning plans made for her, she falls in with the standard scenario for women of her class and type.

 
   Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss 
   Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a 
   home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such 
   possibilities did not occur to any of Laura's relations. Her father being 
   dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the 
   household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as if she 
   were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of 
   as they should think best. 

Laura's beloved childhood home goes to a brother who doesn't care about it, and she goes to the other brother in London, who cares not much more about her. She spends more than twenty years in what amounts to comfortable and well-upholstered servitude to her spoiled brother, his capable cipher of a wife, and their uninteresting children. On the surface, she is everyone's familiar, predictable Aunt Lolly, confirmed in "the habit of useless activity."

Her inner life is rather different.