COUNTY FOLK
PEACE BREAKS OUT. By Angela Thirkell. Hamish Hamilton: Australian Edition, 1947. NGELA THIRKELL infuriates some people. "She’s so terribly snobbish." She might reply that this doesn’t follow from her pre-occupation with "the county"; she simply writes of life as she sees it, as she believes it exists, "You might say Thackeray Was a dreadful snob’ if you didn’t know that he wrote The Book of Snobs. It is certain, however, that Angela Thirkell puts the gentry into a kindly limelight, and leaves "the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques," though no one knows better that the cheques are not what they were, and that from the next line, "in endless English comfort by county folk caressed," two wars have struck out the "endless." The fact that she does not sound the depths, and gives us so much of the chatter of a society in which manners are stars and ideas supernumeraries, may obscure her real gifts to some. She has a keen eye for oddities of character, a considerable gift for social satire, and a very pretty wit, touched with what a critic calls "gay malice." Peace Breaks Out, a story of her recreated Barsetshire, is not a vintage
Thirkell. It lacks the sustained interest of The Headmistress. But it is good fun pleasantly flavoured with charm.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 13
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220COUNTY FOLK New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 13
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