"As everyone knows Northbridge High Street, there is no need to describe it..."

Karen of Books and Chocolate included Northbridge Rectory in a list of books that she received for Christmas. It's one of my favorite of Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series, due in large part to the central character, Verena Villars, the Rector's wife. Since I'm in-between books, I pulled my old Carroll & Graf edition off the shelf. It has been a while since I re-read it, and I don't think I ever noticed before how strongly Thirkell evoked Anthony Trollope in the book's first pages. The opening line is pure Trollope: "As everyone knows Northbridge High Street there is no need to describe it," though he usually says "all the world" rather than "everyone." Having asserted there is no need for description, Thirkell continues, "so we will proceed to do so."

Northbridge, a famous centre for the wool trade of the South in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had gently declined ever since. It had indeed risen for a short period to eminence as a rotten borough, but now for more than a hundred years its calm had been unbroken. . . the High Street with its lovely curve is the whole town. At the upper end are the gentry houses, still in many cases inhabited by descendants of the woolstaplers or prosperous graziers who had built them three or four hundred years ago of honey-coloured stone that has weathered to soft greys and browns lightly stained with lichen here and there, the roofs made of thin stone slabs. Just where the street swings round the curve that is known to every tourist, stands the little Town Hall on its twelve stone legs . . . Beyond the Town Hall the houses are newer; late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, flat-fronted, with great sash windows on the ground and first floors . . . Here live the professional classes, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and so forth, most of whom have rooms in Barchester where they carry on the larger part of their business . . . And beyond them the street tails off into the picturesque and insanitary cottages of wood and clay, or lath and plaster, white-washed, with thatched roofs, descendants of the original mud huts of Barsetshire under the Kings of Wessex and not much changed in all those years. Bunces and Scatcherds had lived on the same spot and almost in the same house when Barsetshire was half forest . . . The church stands on a little eminence and behind it is the rectory, an ugly but commodious house whose long garden slopes to the river, while in the town itself are various chapels or conventicles patronised by the lesser tradespeople.

Then however Thirkell moves into her own style, and a very familiar setting in the Second World War. "In every war, however unpleasant, there are a certain number of people who with a shriek of joy take possession of a world made for them."

Mrs. Villars, the Rector's wife, who had come to Northbridge just before the war began, anxious to do her best with the parish work for which her husband's previous career as a schoolmaster had not prepared her, suddenly found herself, rather to her relief, quite o'ercrowded by a number of women who had during what is mistakenly called the Last War driven ambulances, run canteens, been heads of offices, of teams of land girls, of munition welfare, and had been pining in retirement on small incomes ever since. Under their ferocious, yet benignant reign, evacuee children were billeted, clothed and communally fed; visiting parents were provided with canteens; a cottage hospital was staffed and stocked; National Savings were collected; householders were bullied into Digging for Victory in unsuitable soil; other householders were forced to keep chickens which laid with reluctance and died with fervour of unknown diseases; stirrup-pumps were tested; blackmail in the shape of entertainments to provide comforts for every branch of the services at home and abroad was levied. In fact, as Miss Pemberton said, If the Government had shown the same Team Spirit as Northbridge the war would have been over long ago.

I think this is the only book where Mrs. Villars plays a major part, though she has a cameo in another of my favorites, Jutland Cottage. I think it's also this book that introduces us to the wonderful High Church priest "Tubby" Fewling, as well as Mrs. Turner and her nieces, who run the communal kitchen. And then there is probably the most obnoxious character Thirkell ever created, Mrs. Spender, whose husband the Major is billeted at the Rectory. (Of course the Bishop of Barchester and his wife might give Mrs. Spender a run for that title, if we ever met them in person.)

The problem for me is that I can never stop with just one of Thirkell's books, particularly those set in the war years.

Two volumes of Christmas stories

Angela Thirkell, Christmas at High Rising
Anthony Trollope, The Christmas Stories

I had my heart set on the new Virago collection of Angela Thirkell's short stories as soon as I first read about it.  I was lucky enough to get my copy last month, and I've been saving it for Christmas reading.  The volume of Anthony Trollope's Christmas stories was part of a trove of Trollopes I found last year at a used-book store.  I had set it aside for holiday reading as well, but though I did read some of the stories, in the hustle and bustle of packing for the unexpected move a year ago, I never finished it.  Given the overlap in their stories of Barsetshire, it seemed right to be reading these two together for Christmas this year.

The Thirkell stories were not, contrary to my expectations, all Christmas stories.  Nor are they all set in High Rising, the village that gives its name to the first of Thirkell's Barsetshire novels.  Those that are set there feature Laura Morland, one of my favorite characters in the series.  With Laura comes her school-boy son Tony.  I know he is a favorite of many Thirkell fans, but I find him really exhausting - much as his mother and her friends do.  At least here he comes in smaller doses than in the novels.  Among the stories, I particularly enjoyed "Christmas at Mulberry Lodge," an account of a late-Victorian Christmas, which is probably autobiographical. It reminded me of Thirkell's memoir Three Houses.  I also enjoyed the last, "A Nice Day in Town," published in 1942, which describes a day Laura Morland spends in war-time London, coping with crowds and the shortages of practically everything she hopes to buy.

The Trollope stories are one volume of five published by The Trollope Society, collecting all his short stories.  This volume includes a forward by Joanna Trollope, and an Introduction by Betty Breyer.  Both make it clear that Trollope was ambivalent about the kind of Christmas stories that came out every year in special holiday editions of magazines and papers. He refused to write "humbug" stories with just "a relish of Christmas."  As he wrote in his Autobiography (which I seem to quote a lot), he wanted his stories "to instil others with a desire for Christmas religious thought or Christmas festivities - or, better still, Christmas charity."  But there would be no Ghosts of Christmas, nor any Tiny Tims, in his stories.  Actually, sometimes there isn't all that much of Christmas itself in his "Christmas" stories.  "Catherine Carmichael: or, Three Years Running" is a very bleak story set in New Zealand, where the holiday marks the years a miserable, mistreated wife passes in what really amounts to a forced marriage.  "Christmas at Thompson Hall" is about a wife dragging her husband home from France for a good old-fashioned family Christmas with her family at the Hall, but it's set mostly in a Paris hotel, where the wife is trying to get a mustard-plaster for her hypochondriac husband.  "Not If I Know It:" concerns a brother spending the holiday with his sister and her husband; a casual question sets off a tiff that threatens to ruin Christmas for everyone. I could think of a couple of similar scenarios in past family Christmases.  This volume also includes Trollope's only short story set in Barsetshire, "The Two Heroines of Plumplington."

I found one of the stories particularly interesting, because of its setting and its theme.  In "The Widow's Mite," published in 1863, Nora Field is preparing for her marriage to a young American, Frederic Frew, who will take her home with him to Philadelphia and an America torn by the Civil War. (Frederic is apparently exempt from the Army.)  Nora sees the effects of war daily, from her uncle's rectory in Cheshire, where mills are standing empty because no cotton is coming from the southern states.  Her aunt and uncle are absorbed in relief work, raising funds simply to keep the mill hands in food and clothing.  Nora has done what she can to help, out of her limited means, but she feels that she must do more, before she can leave her home for a new life in America.  It is a serious consideration of true charity, of obeying the Scriptural commands to be generous in caring for those in need, particularly at Christmas.  I liked and admired Nora for what she was trying to do.  The story also of course allowed Trollope a few digs at America and Americans.  He set another story in Civil War America, "The Two Generals," about a family in Kentucky divided over the war.  This undoubtedly drew on his experiences touring the United States in 1861, which he chronicled in North America.

These two books made perfect Christmas reading, and I know I'll come back to them again, particularly to Trollope, for his slightly acidic perspective on the holidays.

The Brandons, with a copy to share

The Brandons, Angela Thirkell

I was killing time before a meeting the other evening, browsing at Half Price Books, when I came across two Angela Thirkell novels, Wild Strawberries and The Brandons, in Carroll & Graf paperbacks editions.  I have copies of both, but knowing they can be hard to find I thought it would be fun to pass them along.  I'm happy to send them anywhere, so if you'd like one or the other, leave a comment and tell me which one, or email me (my address is down at the bottom right).  These are used books - Wild Strawberries is a bit battered, intact, but definitely a reading copy.

After I got home I was leafing through The Brandons, which I haven't read in a while, and of course soon found myself back at Chapter One and settling in for "Breakfast at Stories."  This book was my introduction to Thirkell, and it has always been one of my favorites in the very long Barsetshire series.  Published in 1939, it is the last of the pre-war books, and it has something of the timeless quality of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings stories.  The central character, Lavinia Brandon, is a widow living with her son Francis (who works in Barchester) and her daughter Delia, in her small but beautiful Georgian house Stories, in Pomfret Madrigal, a village in West Barsetshire.  The Brandons aren't one of the county families, though a branch of the family has been settled at Brandon Abbey since the 1860s, of which an elderly aunt, Miss Brandon, is now the last remaining.

Just as the book is a favorite, Lavinia Brandon is a favorite characters in the series.  In a Georgette Heyer novel, she would be described as a "lovely widgeon."

Certainly anyone who had met her coming furtively and hurriedly but triumphantly in by the drawing-room window, her arms full of the gardener's flowers, would entirely have agreed with her own opinion of herself and found her still not unattractive, or possibly have felt that a woman with so enchanting an expression could not have been more charming even in her youth.  Mrs. Brandon herself, in one of her moods of devastating truthfulness, had explained her own appearance as the result of a long and happy widowhood . . . The only fault she could find with her children was that they didn't laugh at the same jokes as she did, but finding that all their friends were equally humorless, she accepted it placidly, seeing herself as a spirit of laughter born out of its time.

Men of all ages tumble headlong into love with her, which entertains her children even as it embarrasses them.  While she is sometimes silly, there is an underlying shrewdness, combined with a warm heart.  She is prone to doing and saying things with one eye on their effect, but she has the saving grace of humor, never taking herself or her ploys too seriously.

Not much really happens in this book.  Old Miss Brandon is growing weaker, and the Stories family visits her at the Abbey, with another cousin, Hilary Grant.  There is much speculation about who will inherit the Abbey if Miss Brandon dies.  Hilary is spending the summer working with Mr. Miller, the rector of Pomfret Madrigal, preparing to read law.  Both he and Mr. Miller fall victim to Mrs. Brandon.  Since both are working on books, their devotion takes the form of reading their manuscripts to her, never noticing how far her attention wanders.  Their work is interrupted not just by the events at the Abbey, but also by picnics and the highlight of the village Fête.

Though this is the 8th book in the series (if you count The Demon in the House), I think it's really the start of the series as such.  The previous books all share a common setting in Barsetshire, but they are stand-alones, with each book introducing a new set of characters and a new area of the county.  I think that Laura Morland is the only character who appears in more than one of the earlier books.  In the books that follow, characters from the earlier books are woven into what becomes a kind of continuing story, sometimes in central roles, sometimes as supporting actors.  Mrs. Brandon's story in the later books is not always as light-hearted as this one, though it has a happy ending.  (It was very gratifying to see her son Francis behaving so well in this book; he grows into a bit of a rotter later.)  Here picnics, a funeral, and the Fête bring back Laura Morland and her son Tony (for what I think is his last appearance), as well as Dr. Ford, the hardest-working doctor in Barsetshire.  We also get Lady Norton, not quite the Dreadful Dowager of the later books, and the Keiths, introduced with the attorney Noel Merton in Summer Half.  Lydia Keith was at school with Delia Brandon, under the infamous headmistress Miss Pettinger.  There are references to Lord Pomfret and his agent Roddy Wicklow (from Pomfret Towers), and hints of the perpetual spiritual warfare carried on between the Bishop of Barchester (with his wife) and the clergy.  Mr. Miller, the rector of Pomfret Madrigal, who of course has the proper antipathy toward the Bishop, will appear in later books, as will Sir Edmund Pridham, Mrs. Brandon's trustee, who has his fingers in every county pie.

If you are new to Angela Thirkell, I think The Brandons is an excellent place to start.  I always come back to it with pleasure, meeting the Brandons themselves again, and watching as the story opens up to Angela Thirkell's wonderful series.

Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries, Angela Thirkell

When I discovered Angela Thirkell, back in 2000, and then quickly became obsessed with her Barsetshire books, I was lucky enough to find most of them here in Houston - some used, many new.  Since then they have all but disappeared, at least from our stores.  Though I own almost all the Barsetshire series, I always check in used-book stores, and sometimes one of the later titles turns up (often Close Quarters, for some reason).  The other day at Kaboom Books, when I saw a Carroll & Graf edition of Wild Strawberries, I nearly leapt across the aisle.  I had a copy of this once, but I gave it away in one of my periodic clear-outs (along with Pomfret Towers), because I remembered them as a bit tiresome, compared with my favorites.  I would never do that now, knowing how hard it is to find her books.  I've particularly wanted to find this one again, since the different posts about the gorgeous new Vintage editions made me wonder if my opinion of it would be different now.

The Barsetshire novels often center on one of the county families, and this is the first book to feature the Leslies, whose estate at Rushwater is in West Barsetshire.  The head of the family, Henry Leslie, is married to Lady Emily, a granddaughter of the Earl of Pomfret.  They lost their eldest son in the Great War, but his son Martin, the heir to Rushwater, lives with his grandparents.  There are two other sons (John and David), and a daughter Agnes, married to Robert Graham, who appears I think exactly once in the entire series but whose presence looms large.  As the book opens, Robert is in South America on War Department business, and Agnes and their three children are staying with her parents.  The Leslies have also invited Robert's niece Mary Preston to spend the summer while her mother goes abroad.  John and David live in London but often come down to Rushwater for the weekend.  John is a widower still grieving his young wife.  David, with oodles of charm and talent, is a dilettante who can't settle down to anything or anyone.  Mary quickly falls for him, though she can't help but appreciate John's quieter kindness and good nature.

Romantic complications aside, the summer is a busy one at Rushwater.  There are visitors, including the unwelcome Mr Holt, a rather boring expert on gardens and a professional houseguest.   More visitors arrive when the Vicar lets his rectory for the summer to a French family, the Boulles, with whose children Martin finds a common interest.  There is the annual tenants' concert, and Lady Emily and Agnes, with Mary, are also planning a great celebration for Martin's 17th birthday.  In Thirkell's later books, she would use this to bring together characters from across Barsetshire, giving them (and us) a chance to meet again, to catch up on family and county news, and usually to abuse the Bishop of Barchester and his wife.  But to my surprise, that doesn't happen here.  The only recurring character that I noticed, Lady Norton (better known as the Dreadful Dowager), is only mentioned in passing; she doesn't even appear on-stage, let alone at the party.  [N.B. I'd forgotten this book was only the second of the Barsetshire series, after High Rising, so she didn't yet have her large cast of characters.]

This is very much a Leslie book, which is partly why I had decided I didn't need to keep it.  Actually, Martin Leslie is one of my favorite characters in the later books, after he inherits Rushwater.  But I find his grandmother Lady Emily and his Aunt Agnes rather annoying at times.  At least in this book everyone seems to find them annoying at times, starting on the first page with the Vicar, but mother and daughter are so charming that everyone forgives them.  For me Lady Emily's daffiness wears after a while, as does Agnes' woolly-minded adoration of her unruly children, to whom she is contstantly cooing "Oh, wicked ones, wicked ones."  Her children play large parts in the later books, and I much prefer Clarissa in this one, plump and silent.

But in the end this book is more about Mary and Martin, and I enjoyed their stories, and the summer at Rushwater House.  I'm glad to have this back on my shelves, next to Pomfret Towers, and there they will both stay this time.

"The ill-starred folly of a few spring weeks"

Ankle Deep, Angela Thirkell

Angela Thirkell's novels are so hard to find these days that I did a classic double-take when I saw this on the library sale carts.  It's been a long time since I've had a new Thirkell novel to read - new to me, anyway.  Ankle Deep was published in 1933, the same year as High Rising, the first of the Barsetshire novels.  Though it isn't part of the series, it does share some familiar themes.

The story opens with a phone call, as Fanny Turner invites an older couple, Mr and Mrs Howard, to spend a weekend at her family's country cottage, Waterside.  Next she invites Valentine Ensor, a divorced man, one of her string of swains, for whom she is trying to find a rich second wife.  Mrs Howard then calls back to ask if they can bring their married daughter Aurea, home for a visit from Canada.  Fanny, who knows that her husband Arthur once hoped to marry Aurea, agrees to this, planning to pair the two off for a nostalgic flirtation while she occupies herself with Valentine.

When Aurea arrives with her parents, however, she and Valentine upset Fanny's plans by their immediate attraction to each other, which develops quickly into love.  Both have suffered from unhappy marriages.  It is apparently no secret among Val's friends that his wife had a series of affairs, and after discovering this he allowed her to divorce him (he completed this noble sacrifice by paying her a handsome alimony, which he can hardly afford).  As he tells Aurea, "She was - rather promiscuous" - not the sort of blunt statement one finds in the Barsetshire books.  Now Val plays the man-about-town, moving from woman to woman while avoiding any real attachment.  On the other hand, Aurea has what seems on the surface a tranquil marriage to Ned, a kind husband and father to their two children.  She fell in love and married him at eighteen, but now she dislikes and despises him - not apparently because of anything he has done, but because she has fallen out of love with him.  She cannot even bear his touch, let alone sex with him.  She winces at the memory of repeated scenes with Ned "whimpering, actually whimpering, because she was not what he called 'kind,' of the utter contempt with which she finally gave in."  Even in allusive language, this caught me off-guard.  Thirkell presents Aurea as a woman married too young, and to the wrong man, who has reacted by withdrawing into herself, barricading herself physically and emotionally against everyone but her children and her parents.  Then she meets Val, and they fall into a physically chaste but emotionally torrid romance that plays out over her last remaining weeks in England.

The Barsetshire books are packed with engagements and marriages, in most of which the couples live happily ever after.  The problems they face are usually external, like finances, or for the older couples the complicated lives of their children.  There are exceptions, of course, like the hints we get that Francis Brandon is not a satisfactory husband.  But for the younger couples at least, the stories seem more concerned with courtship.  There is nothing in those books like the marriages here, or in O, These Men, These Men, published in 1935 and generally considered a roman a clef, the heroine of which escapes an abusive and drunken husband.  In Ankle Deep, Thirkell uses her six characters to explore both happy and unhappy marriages, and particularly to analyze the character of Aurea.  As in the Barsetshire books, she also considers parenthood, including the parenting of grown children (I was reminded especially of the Grantlys and the Beltons).  Aurea is the Howards' only child.  They are painfully aware of her misery but unable to help her, and they watch her growing intimacy with Val with great concern.  Aurea's children are one of the only ties holding her to her marriage.  At the same time, she can hardly bear the separation from her own aging parents (something Thirkell herself probably knew well, from her years living in Australia).  Fanny, on the other hand, is happy to turn her children over to her mother-in-law at every opportunity, freeing her time for her constant flirtations.

With Aurea staying in her parents' home, she and Val must meet elsewhere, in restaurants and clubs.  They spend one frustrating evening at the cinema, seeing a film about Benuto Cellini, "The Great Italian Medieval Lover and Craftsman of All Time."  Thirkell's parody of an epic historical film here adds a welcome lighter note, and a familiar one.  As far as I can tell, this film is the only one mentioned in her books that doesn't star Glamora Tudor.

In the end, I found Ankle Deep an interesting rather than an engaging read.  Aurea is a difficult character, child-like and on some levels immature, and I found her recurring emotional storms a bit wearying after a while.  I understand her isolation, and her inability to confide even in her own mother; in Thirkell's world outside help is apparently not an option, unfortunately.  I am glad to have read this, and to see how it fits into the arc of Thirkell's stories, but in the end I prefer her Barsetshire world.

The edition I read is from Moyer Bell, with the usual missing sentences, transposed names and misspelled words (I was puzzled for a moment by a "car thorse").  I'm very glad to see that Virago is republishing the Barsetshire books, though now I'll be tempted by the new editions.