I think I must have read this Angela Thirkell novel first when I was 13, stuck in bed with mumps, and very bored. It entranced me. The tiresome adult children converging on the beleaguered and saintly mother; the glow of perfection cast over the rightful landowning classes; the crashing irruption of the Adams family into … Continue reading Angela Thirkell’s The Headmistress
Category: Angela Thirkell
Angela Thirkell’s Summer Half
Angela Thirkell is resurrected here from the Really Like this Book podcast scripts, for her wonderful, joyous, comic novel Summer Half (1937), in which the headmaster’s daughter gets engaged to the junior classics master, and causes mayhem by being horrible to him for the rest of the term. Other engagements also happen, because no Angela Thirkell novel is … Continue reading Angela Thirkell’s Summer Half
Angela Thirkell in print
Virago Books (did you know that they're now owned by Little, Brown? I hadn't realised ... there goes another independent publishing house into the maw of Big Business); anyway, Virago Books are republishing Angela Thirkell novels, having finally realised that (1) they are terrific, and (2) people want to buy them. They asked me if … Continue reading Angela Thirkell in print
The outbreak of war: Angela Thirkell’s Cheerfulness Breaks In
Today's letter in the Really Like This Book podcast series script catch-up is T, so it has to be Angela Thirkell. I've spent several years writing about Thirkell, so I need to remind myself that although she used to be really famous, now she is hardly known at all, unless you're in the Angela Thirkell … Continue reading The outbreak of war: Angela Thirkell’s Cheerfulness Breaks In
A G Macdonell and England, Their England
Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book's podcast script rerun is M. A G Macdonell’s England, Their England, from 1933, is a satirical novel about English society, and has long had a grip on my understanding of the English. I was (am) a hybrid Anglo-Scot, never quite accepted by my Scottish school-friends or my English cousins … Continue reading A G Macdonell and England, Their England
My very own book: Novelists Against Social Change
Novelists Against Social Change: Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) This is my very own book, that I've been writing for what seems like forever: a long study of how John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell wrote their conservatism into their best-selling fiction. It's now finally been published, with stunning cover art by Barry Rowe. … Continue reading My very own book: Novelists Against Social Change
The loucheness of the conservative novelist: Angela Thirkell writes about camp
Here's an extract from my next book, due out in July. This bit is about how Angela Thirkell, that most proper and dictatorial enforcer of correct social behaviour in her novels from the 1930s to the 1950s, let herself go when chortling with the girls about sex. Thirkell’s great lesbian creations of Miss Hampton and … Continue reading The loucheness of the conservative novelist: Angela Thirkell writes about camp
Kate Macdonald 