Lolly Willowes at 100
The Society is pleased to be organising ‘Lolly Willowes at 100’, an international conference to mark the centenary of the publication of Warner’s first and still her best-known novel, Lolly Willowes.
The conference will offer a fresh perspective on literary modernism by giving centrality to Warner’s first book – a provocative and serious fantasy about freedom, gender and religion, a strikingly original work written in the same decade as Ulysses, The Waste Land and Mrs Dalloway. Lolly Willowes remains Warner’s most popular novel and it is often looked on as her most important; the conference aims to broaden the view of Warner by highlighting the themes of religion and the supernatural in the book and her wider oeuvre, and the socio-political reach and ambition of her work.
The keynote speaker will be the novelist Adam Mars-Jones, and the conference will also include papers by Diane Purkiss and Ronald Hutton, and an introduced performance of excerpts from Michael Alec Rose’s 2019 operatic adaptation of the book. We have invited a panel of poets and fiction writers (Philip Hensher, Juliet McKenna, Deryn Rees-Jones) to speak about Warner’s influence on their own practice.
The conference will start at 10am on Friday 29th May and finish around 5.30pm on Saturday 30th May. It will be consolidated with a selection of papers to be published in the 2026 Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society.
Attendees of ‘Lolly Willowes at 100’ are required to register in advance. The early registration fees are available until 31st March: £55 for both days (£30 for students and unwaged), and a single day at £30 (£20 for students and unwaged).
After Easter it will be possible to book attendance at single sessions. The conference fee will cover participation in all the conference sessions together with drinks and refreshments – tea and coffee and buffet lunch on both days, and a drinks reception. A conference dinner is planned (not covered in the registration fee) at the end of the event on Saturday 30th May.
You can register here. For further inquiries, please email info@townsendwarner.com. We look forward to your participation.