January 30, 1890

Angela Thirkell  (January 30, 1890 to January 29, 1961), was a British novelist. Here is how, when some of her titles were republished, The Independent outlined her current significance:

Just as you can enjoy the novels of Virginia Woolf while finding her obsession with servants annoying, so you can appreciate Angela Thirkell even though her concerns about class clearly coloured her life....

Thirkell was born into artistic aristocracy in 1890. The daughter of the classicist J W Mackail and granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, she was also the sister of the novelist Denis Mackail, cousin to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, [a British Prime Minister] and the god-daughter of J M Barrie. Educated at St Paul’s, and in Paris and Germany, she was painted and sketched as a society beauty, married a bisexual baritone, and named her first son after his former lover. Two more children followed before she divorced her husband for adultery, married a Tasmanian engineer, and set sail for Australia.

But Melbourne life was not her idea of high society. Hating every minute, she dumped her husband and returned to Britain. Meanwhile, she had begun writing. Setting most of her novels in the fictional county of Barsetshire, nicked from Anthony Trollope’s novels, she borrowed liberally from John Galsworthy, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and William Thackeray. The idea that her books might be read by her upper class friends filled her with horror. She wasn’t producing literature, she said, but something frivolous, populist, and more easily digested.

In the 1930s, she... hit her stride with gently mocking social satires such as High Rising, [1933] that have value today as nostalgic reminders of the period. Her dialogue is frequently very funny and the novels are a delight, with touches of E F Benson, E M Delafield, and P G Wodehouse. ..[A]s Thirkell aged, her novels turned into simplistic romances.

The only biography of her was deeply contemptuous, and long-refuted by her son Lance, who became a BBC controller. Her two other sons were Colin MacInnes, who wrote Absolute Beginners, and Graham MacInnes, a distinguished diplomat and a novelist, so she continued the family line.[stet] Her best books have now been elegantly republished by Virago.

One of her books, Coronation Summer, (1953) is set in 1838 and may be one of her "simplistic romances". The story outlines Frances Harcourt and her visit to London to partake of the festivities surrounding the coronation. A small scene in this story interests us. She describes the revenge of Eton school boys on a Doctor who had flogged them for some infraction. This prank involved the Doctor's cat. The students caught this pet and tied the Doctor's wig on the cat's head. Thirkell describes "how it squalled and scratched till we cut its claws, and then we fastened squibs to its tail and let it loose in the School Yard, and though the Doctor flogged the whole form, no one gave the joke away."

The scene Thirkell describes sounds authentically Victorian to me.