Wednesday, May 28, 2025

High Rising (1933) by Angela Thirkell




💜 High Rising is the first novel in Thirkell's Barsetshire Chronicles - a series of 29 books set in Antony Trollope's fictional English county: Barsetshire. Like her contemporaries, E.F. Benson and E.M. Delafield, Thirkell's works were placed in the comedy of manners genre. It's witty and hilarious - the perfect light domestic satire which I liked very much.

💜 Laura Morland is a middle-aged widow with three children. Two of them had left home to pursue their careers, leaving the youngest, a precocious and boisterous boy named Tony, to be still in her care. The two of them spent Christmas holiday at their country home in a small village of High Rising. Her closest neighbor, George Knox, has just hired a secretary. She turned out to be a scheming woman, and her goal is to be next Mrs. Knox. And Laura made it her duty to help her friend George out of Miss Grey's clutches. Will she be able to do it?

💜 I enjoyed the whole reading - it's a light one, but full of well defined characters, and it never lacks of mild surprises and amusing incidents along the way. Laura, especially, is a lovely woman, full of affection for people around her, energetic, and efficient. It's no wonder that she got a few suitors - even a man younger than her. She is a successful writer, though she daubed herself as a writer of good bad books (who doesn't love this kind of book?!). The others are interesting too - her son Tony, for example, who loved automotive and obsessed with his model railway. Countless hilarious events come from that! And I also loved how the women closed rank in their "fight" against the scheming secretary they nicknamed "the Incubus". Well, not only the women, but also few of the men. And beyond that scheme, Laura still had time to bring a young couple together. On the whole, it's a charming and heartwarming story!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

2 comments:

  1. I love this long series and have read quite a few of them now. Occasionally the same characters crop up, (Tony is in a couple more) but mainly the characters and the villages or big houses change. There are several WW2 ones too which are very good.

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  2. You have to love Tony to love this series! I've read them all up until the end of WW2, which is all the ones Virago republished.

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