Angela Thirkell

Charming, very funny indeed. Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself -- Alexander McCall Smith Appealing Glasgow Sunday Herald A smart new edition ... A terrific holiday story The Lady A delightfully entertaining comedy of manners. Full of period charm and witty authorial comment Good Book Guide To be so witty and charming yet also so brillia...

It is August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home. But the numerous and impossibly glamorous Dean family—exquisite Rachel, her capable husband, and six of their nine brilliant children—have come for the holidays, and their hostess Mrs. Palmer plans to rope everyone into performin...

Pomfret Towers, Barsetshire seat of the earls of Pomfret, was constructed, with great pomp and want of concern for creature comforts, in the once-fashionable style of Sir Gilbert Scott's St Pancras station. It makes a grand setting for a house party at which gamine Alice Barton and her brother Guy are honoured guests, mixing with the headstrong Rivers family, the tally-ho Wicklows and, most charmi...

As the title of this bright, unashamedly nostalgic novel suggests, Angela Thirkell had a genius for the quotidian. Published in 1939, Before Lunch was the last of Thirkell's books published before the darkening shadow of World War II made her glittering, reassuring portrait of the English countryside (embodied in "Barsetshire," her own Yoknapatawpha County) seem more and more anachronistic. T...