Angela Thirkell’s The Headmistress

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 →

E M Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady

This week on the Really Like This Book's podcast scripts catch-up I’m looking at a total classic, E M Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady. * This great comic novel from 1930 has never been out of print, and is the quintessential British women’s middlebrow novel from the 1930s. Yet, I’m not sure that many people know … Continue reading E M Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady →

1950s county family looks nervously at social change: Jane Hervey’s Vain Shadow

If you like E F Benson’s petty bitchery, and the psychological dissection of Barbara Pym's novels, you will love Jane Hervey’s Vain Shadow, first published in 1963. It is now a Persephone reprint in its demurely anonymous grey cover, now synonymous with a certain type of novel, recovered from the past, for middle-class readers. Virago … Continue reading 1950s county family looks nervously at social change: Jane Hervey’s Vain Shadow →

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 →

Vita Sackville-West’s No Signposts in the Sea

This is Vita Sackville’s West’s last novel, and it is exquisite. For once I agree with the blurb on the back of the Virago edition: ‘this haunting, elegiac tale, published the year before her death, is her last and finest novel’. I do NOT agree with Victoria Glendinning, who wrote an introduction, who says that … Continue reading Vita Sackville-West’s No Signposts in the Sea →