Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion, and the Supernatural

IAS Common Ground, University College London, 29-30 May 2026

On 29-30 May 2026 the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society will host an international conference to mark the centenary of the publication of Warner's first and still her best-known novel, Lolly Willowes. The conference, titled ‘Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion and the Supernatural’, will be part of the UCL200 programme of events. It is being organised by the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society in collaboration with UCL Press, the IAS and the UCL English Department. The keynote speaker will be the novelist Adam Mars-Jones, and the conference will also include an introduced performance of excerpts from Michael Alec Rose's 2019 operatic adaptation of the book. Twenty other proposals for papers have been accepted, from speakers in the USA and New Zealand as well as the UK.

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, whose centenary is our immediate occasion, remains Warner's most popular novel (it has sold ten thousand copies in the 2020 Penguin Classics reprint) and it is often looked on as her most important; the conference aims to broaden this view of Warner by highlighting the themes of religion and the supernatural in the book and her wider oeuvre. The book is sometimes taken as lightweight or a jeu d’esprit and by flagging up these charged cultural themes we aim to prompt discussion of the socio-political reach and ambition of Warner's work.

As the first conference on Warner this decade, the event will stimulate the growing interest in her oeuvre and widen current perspectives on her work. It aims not only to showcase new perspectives on her writing but also to demonstrate (and invigorate) Warner’s continuing cultural salience by exploring her continuing influence on later writers and artists. With that in mind, 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. We have also arranged for the American composer Michael Alec Rose to present a session based on, and with excerpts from, his 2019 chamber opera Lolly Willowes.

We intend to record the conference events at the Institute of Advanced Studies, as we have done with previous runnings of the biannual Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture, and to make them digitally available after the conference (subject to the agreement of speakers). Whatever the conference achieves will therefore be consolidated with a lasting online presence after the event and also in the Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. Papers offered for the conference will be scrutinised by a panel of experts, and a peer-reviewed selection will be published in the 2026 issue of the Journal, published by open access by UCL Press.