" To read Angela Thirkell is to visit dear and valued friends, and, like the best of friends, to learn something about yourself in the process."
What is the anglophiliac bibliophile to do?
I had sustained several years of being doomed to re-reading these and other august writers for genteel comedies of manners with biting wit and characters I actually cared about, when a bookseller friend asked me if I'd ever heard of Angela Thirkell.
The name sounded vaguely familiar. She waxed rhapsodic about this heiress apparent to the mantle of Trollope, and I eagerly attacked August Folly, devouring it in great gulps of laughter punctuated by the occasional tear. I progressed rapidly through the six books in print (Summer Half, Wild Strawberries, Pomfret Towers, Before Lunch,Cheerfulness Breaks In) only to hit the most frustrating of brick walls. My new favorite author had written more than 30 novels, but only six could be easily obtained.
Until Moyer Bell stepped in. This unassuming publisher has dedicated itself to the systematic reissue of all of Angela Thirkell's works. Availability is key to Angela Thirkell's body of work because it has a generational scope rivaled only by Trollope himself. To read Angela Thirkell is to visit dear and valued friends, and, like the best of friends, to learn something about yourself in the process.
And there are so many to choose from. With the entire world recently having gone through a spate of nostalgia for World War II, it's an especially rich experience to read Thirkell's wartime novels. Beginning with Cheerfulness Breaks In, Thirkell shows us the reality of the early months of war from the lousy heads of evacuee children to the rapidity of wartime romance to the hardships of rationing. But as the title suggests, cheerfulness does break in and a loving humor acknowledges the foibles and weaknesses of individuals while letting us laugh with them, rather than at them. We feel the frustration of a schoolboy who is afraid there won't be any war left for him by the time he is old enough, and the resigned sadness of the schoolmaster whose empathy is tempered by a deep sadness at the waste of life.
Growing Up and The Headmistress will shortly be joined by Miss Bunting in the annals of war-torn Barsetshire. Growing Up acknowledges a newer edition of a "lost" generation, thrown against a relief of earlier, World War I era loss. From the glimpse of the sadly diminished Winter Overcotes train station on the first page to the promise of a much-longed-for child on the last, Thirkell's particular brand of wise and gentle wit lights up the pages.
Two recently reprinted novels have no roots in Barsetshire but verge on the autobiographical. Ankle Deep and the forthcoming O These Men, These Men echo the unhappiness of Angela Thirkell's two marriages in their portrayals of noble, doomed women. Ankle Deep, one of her earliest works, has flashes of her trademark humor in its pages, but is interesting primarily as a record of how she viewed herself.
Another, more entertaining view of how Angela Thirkell saw herself is revealed in the character of Laura Morland, first introduced in High Rising. Laura, the author of thrillers that take place in the dressmaking establishment of Madame Koska, finds it incomprehensible that real people actually read and enjoy her books.
In the end, this self-portrait turns into self-deprecation for Laura professes to write each book exactly like the one before it. Yet none of Angela Thirkell's characters remains static. Each novel we read invites us to see how the rambunctious Lydia Keith has grown into quiet womanhood (Growing Up) or how Miss Bunting (to be released in September) has weathered the war in which so many of her former pupils have lost their lives.
In one of Thirkell's later works, Cora Palliser (a name familiar to anyone familiar with Trollope) comments that she "Never economises on luxuries." Reading Angela Thirkell is one luxury where indulgence should be both required and repeated.
Ellen Myrick is eternally grateful to Maria May TeSelle, bookseller extraordinaire, for first introducing her to Angela Thirkell.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.