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

This conference is part of the UCL200 programme of events celebrating UCL’s bicentenary.

The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society has organised a two-day international conference to mark the centenary of the publication of Warner’s first and still her best-known novel, Lolly Willowes. 

The event will be held in collaboration with the UCL English Department, UCL Press, and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.

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. 

The keynote lecturer is the novelist Adam Mars-Jones, and other speakers will include a panel of poets and fiction writers (Philip Hensher, Juliet McKenna, and Deryn Rees-Jones) as well as the American composer Michael Alec Rose, presenting excerpts from his 2019 chamber opera, Lolly Willowes. 

Image attribution: Sylvia Townsend Warner. Howard Coster or Cecil Beaton in 1930s, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

2026 marks UCL’s 200th Anniversary and a year of Bicentennial activity and celebration. Visit the UCL200 website to explore the full programme and learn how you can get involved.