When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe…
When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded, I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. . . . Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. . . . Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair. . . . That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. . . . It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.
Why I Became a Witch - Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) wrote Lolly Willowes, her debut novel, shortly before meeting her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland (née Mary Kathleen Macrory). They would live together for thirty-eight years, and catch the attention of MI5 for their communist activities. When Virginia Woolf once asked Warner, at a party in Bloomsbury, how she knew so much about witches, the author of Lolly Willowes replied matter-of-factly: “Because I am one".