The Captive Reader

Is it possible that all good literary editors were killed during the war?  Or they abandoned literature for higher aims post 1945?  Or maybe they just all became secret drinkers and spent their afternoons dozing rather than doing their work?

Somewhere there is an answer.  The question comes in the form of a book, or many books: the entire post-war output of Angela Thirkell.  I’ve recently finished rereading County Chronicle, the 1950 entry into her best selling Barsetshire series, and if ever there were a book in need of an editor, this is it.

The story opens where the last one, The Old Bank House, finished.  Lucy Marling and the wealthy industrialist Sam Adams have just become engaged and Lucy is girding herself to break the news to her parents.  Sam Adams has come a long way since he was first introduced in The Headmistress, with his rough edges slightly smoothed thanks to his friend Mrs Belton but, more importantly, with the citizens of Barsetshire considerably mellowed by the passage of time and the upheaval of war.  To marry into an established gentry family like the Marlings would have been unthinkable a few years before.  Now, it is greeted with happiness by one and all.

But that happiness extends for far, far too long.  The first hundred pages of County Chronicle are concerned with Lucy and Mr Adams wedding preparations.  And then the next hundred pages are devoted to parties (none of which is a combined Conservative rally/pig show, so, really just a waste of time) .  It’s only with the last hundred or so pages that Thirkell finally decides to pull a plot together.

And what a lot of plot she needs to gather up by the end!  The main heroine of this volume is introduced early on.  In need of someone to help keep wedding things organized, knowing Lucy will never do it herself, Mrs Marling asks Isabel Dale to come stay with them and help out.  With little money and an awful mother, Isabel is delighted to work for the Marlings after leaving her post at the Hospital Libraries.  She fits in immediately and earns the family’s respect and love both for her excellent work and her exceedingly correct prejudices:

“We all Hate and Despise the Bishop at Allington,” said Miss Dale with surprising energy, “that is when we think of him which is practically never.  My father was at college with him and they used to call him Old Gasbags.”

So delighted was Mr Marling by this intelligence that his wife was quite prepared for him to kiss Miss Dale by way of cementing this common dislike of the Bishop.

Isabel’s fiancé died during the war and there has been no hint of romance since then.  She is able to resist the non-existent charms of Oliver Marling, the son of the house, who toys with the idea of marrying her briefly at the end of the book, feeling “that he might reward her for her sympathy by offering her his hand, his now quite good income and the privilege of hearing him talk about himself forever.”  What she finds more difficult to resist is the quiet, calm appeal of Jeff Palliser, Lord Silverbridge and heir to the Duke of Omnium.

The days of splendour for the Pallisers are long past; the family is getting by but there is no money to spare – and certainly not enough to allow Jeff to stand for parliament, the one thing he would really like to do.  So instead he contents himself by working at a wartime history of the Barsetshires, work which Isabel ably assists him at.  As their feelings grow, Jeff’s sister Lady Cora does her best to encourage her brother but, convinced Isabel still loves her dead fiancé and that he has nothing to offer her, he stays silent.  Thankfully, a surprisingly and conveniently large inheritance – delightfully gossiped over by everyone in Barsetshire – allows these two to find their happy ending.

A happy ending is also found by Mrs Brandon, who finds love with Bishop Joram and so escapes a house now overrun by her horribly selfish son and his delightful but growing family.  Moving towards their happy ending – slowly, painfully, and exceedingly awkwardly – are Charles Belton and Clarissa Graham.  I love both these characters but Thirkell drags their story out over five books, taking what could have been a very nice romance – two good friends falling in love – into something overwrought and not very dear.  But their engagement in this volume leads to one of my favourite bits, when Charles breaks the news to his mother:

“I say, mother,” said Charles.

“Well, darling?” said Mrs Belton.

“You know Clarissa,” said Charles.

Mrs Belton said she did and what a charming creature she was.

“We’re not in love, you know,” said Charles.

Mrs Belton said of course not.

“Some people get engaged right off,” said Charles.  “A friend of mine called Jimmy Butters met a girl at a dance and got engaged.  But I don’t think that was wise.”

Mrs Belton said she quite agreed.

“I had a few words with Clarissa this afternoon,” said Charles in a manner which the words dégagé and insouciant do not at all adequately describe, “and we thought we might make a do of it.  Sometime, I mean, not now,” he added, lest his mother should have visions of a Fleet marriage with a curtain ring.

“I see,” said his mother, artfully assuming an air of considering something deeply.  “One might call it an understanding.”

Charles said with evident relief that that was about it, a sentence which his mother appeared to comprehend perfectly.  He then kicked the side of the bed in a way that made his mother want to kill him, kissed her with absent-minded affection and went out of the room, shutting the door so hard that it came open again, which annoyed his mother so much that she nearly called him back.

That exchange is classic Thirkell.  But it is one of the very few flashes of it in this otherwise quite dreary book.  Thirkell is, as she was wont to do in her post-war novels, playing with far too large a cast and losing track of them in the process.  Her truly funny moments – Oliver Marling’s disgust when the object of his unrequited passion, Jessica Dean, announces her pregnancy; Charles and Clarissa’s dealings with their parents; the Duke of Omnium’s quest for imaginary book titles – get lost among the dreary exchanges between characters we love but have no need to see this time around and some outrageously racist reminiscences from Bishop Joram on his African parishioners.  What a lot of difference a good editor would have made to this book!