Angela Thirkell's Writing
Like her illustrious grandfather, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Mrs Thirkell’s popularity suffered a decline for some years, her books being thought to be too concerned with the upper middle classes and with a lifestyle that had ceased to exist after World War II. Her books have for the most part been out of print and poorly stocked in libraries for some years, except in the USA, where nearly all of them have been republished in paperback.
To the modern reader, however, they are increasingly of interest as an astonishingly accurate record of English country life from the mid-1930s, through the War, and in the years of austerity afterwards. She wrote at the rate of a book a year, portraying village and small town life exactly as the events of the day affected not just the county families but the doctors, lawyers and architects, agricultural and domestic workers with whom their lives were associated.
Her often caustic wit, her accurate and wickedly funny realisation of unforgettable characters, and her interpolation of an extraordinary range of references and allusions, ranging from Homeric similes through English literature from Shakespeare through Dickens (and of course Trollope) to her cousin Rudyard Kipling, historical episodes, nursery rhymes, laced with a sound knowledge of what everyday life was like, mean that one can read and re-read her books and find something new to enjoy every time.