Victoria here, off to Madison, Wisconsin, in a few days for the meeting of the North American organization of the Angela Thirkell Society. At right, a drawing of Ms. Thirkell (1890 – 1961) by John Singer Sargent, 1918.
The Conference (August 13-15, 2010) will center on the theme
“Upstairs/Downstairs.” Included will be a collection of cars of Thirkell’s period (1930’s-50’s), speakers on Thirkell’s novels, and a gala costume banquet. For more information, click here.
Above, a portrait of Thirkell in later life.
Here are two typical examples of Angela Thirkell’s style of humor, both taken from Love Among the Ruins, published in 1948, and set in Barsetshire of of the same period.
“…she went off to one of those sham organizations that are called by their initials, only no one knows what the initials stand for.”
“It was the P.E.U.G.I.,” said Mrs. Birkett. “Pan-European Union for General Interference…”
Speaking of Scotland…”Though this description of what was evidently heaven was of a very sketchy nature, such was Mr. Belton’s enthusiasm and so pleasing his confidence in his hearers that they all felt deeply nostalgic for Scotland, which most of them had never visited.”
To conclude, here a few excerpts from an essay in the New York Times of January 4, 2008, entitled “Life, Love and the Pleasures of Literature in Barsetshire” by Verlyn Klinkenborg.
“When I first came upon Thirkell, nearly 30 years ago, she seemed like a diverting minor writer. Minor now seems too slight a word to me for
the purveyor of such major pleasures. … Thirkell has often been called nostalgic because she is describing a kind of life — English county life — that was vanishing even as her books were appearing. Yet there is nothing nostalgic or sentimental in her tone… You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own.”
I concur.