A Bad Chooser of Husbands

Do your favourite authors have a recognizable voice, so that you can identify them from a paragraph in the same way that you identify a voice over the telephone? Angela Thirkell has just such a voice, but even so she has been out of fashion since the 1960s – partly, I suspect, because her later work had a strongly rancorous tone. I’d never heard of her until I came to weed a technical college library in the ’70s and happened upon a hardback novel with a map of Barsetshire as a frontispiece. Who was this Thirkell woman?

Angela Mackail (her second husband, George Thirkell, was an Australian engineer) was brought up amongst academics and painters. Her grandfather, Edward Burne-Jones, claimed that when small she terrified him with her bossiness; but he also adored her and painted pictures in the corner where she was often put to stand as a punishment, in order to lighten the ordeal. Tall, strong-minded and intelligent, but a bad chooser of husbands, she found herself needing to earn her own living. After a couple of false starts and one-offs she settled from 1936 on a form of fiction described in her own novels (via her fictional heroine, thriller-writer Mrs Morland) as the ‘good bad book’: in other words a competently conceived and well-written formula which readers could instantly identify and of which they would want more. She pictured those readers as wanting a ‘nice book’ from the ‘libery’; they wouldn’t mind if they found they’d read it before. As Mrs Morland explains: ‘My books are all alike.’ Mrs Thirkell went on to produce a novel a year for nearly thirty years, and in 1939 she even managed two. Does this make her sound like an Enid Blyton for adults? There are some parallels, from the rather complacent value-system of the central characters to the sheer capacity to hold the reader’s attention. Angela Thirkell represents a civilized society in which roles are clear and in which there are plenty of common reference points: Dickens, the Royal Navy (especially Nelson), the royal family, Latin, weeding, dinner-parties and pig-rearing are all Good Things. Her humour has a complicitous note: the ‘nice’ book and the mispronunciation of ‘library’ are not simply designed to raise a smile of recognition, nor are her numerous quotations: she loves language and the way people use or misuse it, and she expects others to share her fascination. Her satire ranges from gentle to savage; her targets pretentious artists, the Minister for Food, the post-war Labour government, mothers, the young, the genteel and refugees living off the fat of the land. As her fiction progresses we behold the creation of an expanding world of characters. Sometimes they are duplicated, and there are some of whose ages she loses track, but all are dropped into the middle of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire, complete with the descendants of his own characters: names like Crawley, Dale and Grantly crop up in practically every book, with or without explanation of their ancestry. Why Barsetshire? Perhaps because her first published piece appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, which had also hosted the first appearance in public of Anthony Trollope, or maybe because they shared the same initials. Whatever the case, this ready-made fictional county offered her a context of rural calm, interspersed with political in-fighting (albeit in a much lower key than its originator’s). All in all, Angela Thirkell provides a good escapist read for anyone who is not irritated by her cultured tones and her inconsequential pace. Nobody, as she assures us openly, ever dies tragically in her books: like Jane Austen she will let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. Yet the wealth of detail and comment, especially in the fifteen or so novels written in her prime, caused Elizabeth Bowen to write crisply in a 1945 review: ‘If the social historian of the future does not refer to this writer’s novels, he will not know his business.’ So what are her novels ‘about’? She would probably have said ‘three or four families in a country village’. Barsetshire becomes the glue that holds a range of those families together, so that although several of the novels focus on a distinct group, the characters are allowed to meet each other in later novels, and many references back to previous events occur to add to the pleasure of a shared history. The main characters are upper-middle-class, though not all are ‘county’: Mrs Morland herself, for instance, is an outsider, rather as Angela herself was when visiting Lady Glenconner at Wilsford Manor. The aristocracy tend to take bit-parts and to symbolize the sufferings of their class through inevitable social change. Her four-star productions such as Pomfret Towers, The Brandons, Northbridge Rectory and Before Lunch deal respectively with a weekend at an Earl’s hideous residence, built in pious imitation of St Pancras Station; the death of an elderly aunt and the resultant romance of her paid companion; the domestic impact of war, with food shortages, five inches of bath-water, the blackout and amateur fire-watching; and the relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man trying to make it as a composer while battling with poor health. What they have in common is the loving portrayal of a community, not just the landed gentry but also servants and hangerson, doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, billeted wartime officers, vicars, land agents and, perhaps surprisingly, a lesbian couple. The Bishop of Barchester, though frequently referred to, never actually appears. He has left-wing tendencies and is thus disapproved of. One interesting development dating from The Headmistress (1944) is the irruption of a really ommon, go-getting businessman with a ginger furry coat, hairy hands and a habit of saying ‘Timon tide wait for no man’. At first a stock comic figure, Sam Adams gradually becomes accepted by his creator and then by Barsetshire’s county families. It is entertaining as well as touching to see her being won over by him, much as perhaps she was by the uncouth Aussies in the strange post-war world inhabited by her second husband. Highly romanticized though the love element usually is, there is some delicious comedy in the affairs of older couples, who may have to hide among the pea-sticks or by the incinerator to do their courting. But otherwise realism abounds. Mrs Thirkell’s women are good at supporting each other, partly from an assumption that men notice very little and are not a lot of use. Her heroines in particular have strong characters and sometimes the physique to match: ‘everyone hoped [Lucy] had stopped growing’ (Lucy’s favourite expression is ‘I’ll tell you what . . .’). And the problems of dealing with servants are at least as apparent as the luxury of employing them: interestingly this is a theme taken up by Angela Thirkell’s novelist brother Denis Mackail in Greenery Street, republished in 2002 by Persephone Books (and reviewed in Issue 1 of Slightly Foxed ). The sheer misery of wartime restrictions, the dashing of post-war hopes which made many people long for the spirit of ’39-’45, and the perpetual slog of running a household are all vividly conveyed. Angela Thirkell wrote with a contemporary setting, so reading the novels from 1939 onwards is rather like having bulletins from the home front. If her aristocrats’ sufferings are chiefly symbolized by their having to live in the servants’ quarters and sow penny packets of nasturtiums to compensate for the lack of gardeners (rather than getting a job, as suggested to Nancy Mitford by Evelyn Waugh), they handle their dilemmas with courage and humour. Her main appeal is almost certainly to women, at whom much of the quieter domestic and affective humour is aimed; and the portraits with greatest depth are those of female characters. She can, however, still charm any reader wanting to be drawn into an effortless narrative who at the same time enjoys spotting and tracking down quotations and allusions, many of which are nowadays quite recondite. There is also a good deal of throwaway sheer fun: the invention, for instance (hence the endpaper map), of place-names like Winter Overcotes, Winter Underclose and Shearing Junction, to add to the Trollopian Barchester, Hogglestock and Allington, as well as branches of familiar shops such as Sheepshanks (Woolworths), Gaiters (Boots), and Lukes and Huxley (Marks and Spencer). There are also a few quite rude bits, unless it’s just in my mind . . . Angela Thirkell could be due for a revival similar to that of Barbara Pym (albeit posthumously: she died in 1961 having hardly started Three Score and Ten, which was completed by the writer and critic C. A. Lejeune). Any of the five novels mentioned above, together with High Rising (the first book referring to Barsetshire), Summer Half or Growing Up would make a good introduction – and in saying this I risk the contumely of members of the Angela Thirkell Society, who would no doubt make impassioned pleas for their own favourites. She’s that kind of writer.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Hilary Temple 2005