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
Tag: Angela Thirkell
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
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 