With cool feminist sophistication and the addition of the paranormal and bizarre, Sylvia Townsend Warner depicts the classic tale of an ageing spinster's battle to escape her domineering family in Lolly Willowes.

With a subversive talent that foreshadows the fantastical flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, Warner is one of the remarkable and essential mavericks of 20th-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles.