Landscape and Embodiment in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and The True Heart

Abstract

The essay contextualises Lolly Willowes and The True Heart in relation to interwar ideas about landscape and ruralism. It argues that the protagonists Laura Willowes and Sukey Bond depart from normative relationships to the English countryside in order to orient themselves more independently in their worlds. It suggests that Warner invests in potentialities of what Sara Ahmed analyses as ‘disorientation’, and that in her nuanced evocations of sexual deviance, landscapes become a prompt for the discursive construction of queer subjectivities.