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: terribly refined
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
