In prose, as much as poetry, the Great War had many consequences. A year afterMrs Dalloway, a startling literary voice with Bloomsbury connections appeared on the London scene with a highly original satire on postwar England. Sylvia Townsend Warner was a young poet who told her editor at Chatto & Windus that she had written a "story about a witch". Within a year, Lolly Willowes had become the talk of the town. Today, Townsend Warner holds her place as a proto-feminist who is also a major minor classic.Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a twentysomething middle-class Englishwoman who, on the death of her father, at first becomes a conventional maiden aunt living with her brother in London. Then, "groping after something", she makes a bid for personal freedom, an escape to Great Mop, "a secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns", where she finds herself happily becoming a witch in communion with the devil.