Lolly Willowes : Or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Alison Lurie (Introduction); 1926/1999. Softcover. (New York Review Books)

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break away from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

First written in the 1920s, this book is timely and entertaining. It was the first selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1926.