Happy Returns

＂Her writing celebrates the solid parochial English virtues of stiff-upper-lippery, good-sportingness, [and] dislike of fuss. . . . Light, witty, easygoing books.＂ --The New Yorker

As 1951 draws to a close, Christmas approaches--but the conservative upper class of Barsetshire have already received the gift they really wanted: Winston Churchill’s re-election as prime minister. Nevertheless, their individual struggles carry on. A member of the House of Lords worries that marriage is not in the cards for him due to an insufficient fortune, while another man does manage to get engaged--but frets that his betrothed doesn’t truly love him. The widow Lady Lufton misses her husband--as well as the money she’s lost to taxes. And an aspiring scholar falls madly in love, but must choose between Oxford and the object of his affections . . .

＂[This] characteristically witty, nostalgic . . . novel in the beloved Barsetshire series describes the lingering effects of WWII on the fictional village that Thirkell adapted from its Victorian inventor and chronicler, Anthony Trollope.＂ --Publishers Weekly

Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was a British author whose ability to produce one book a year, every year, and set in that year blurred the lines between novelist and social historian. Like so many of the writers that she admired--Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot--Thirkell shared their X-ray vision: an unmatched ability to assess the hypocrisies, desires, and prejudices of her characters and, better still, play them for laughs. Her biggest literary project, the Barsetshire Chronicles, consists of twenty-nine novels, each acting as another slice of English country life; a utopian vision of bucolic countryside, grand manors, and village fêtes.