Experiences of a lady worker: class, gender, and labor in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sylvia Townsend Warner took rather a dim view of her first piece of published writing, an account of working in a munitions factory published in Blackwood's Magazine in February 1916. Looking back in 1939, she expressed not only aesthetic but also political distaste for the article. It was “youthfully precious” and written by a lady worker unwittingly co–opted into a scheme “devised to avoid the payment of overtime rates to the regular workers.” This article scrutinizes Warner's Blackwood's article, situating it in the context of contemporary debates about women's war work and considering how Warner's experiences of factory work informed her early thinking about the intersections of labor, class, and gender. These are themes that co–animate Warner's work of the 1920s and the second half of the article offers a reading of her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926).