The Brandons!
by Angela Thirkell (1939)

In one of the last of the pre-war novels (WWII, that is), events center around the Brandons of Stories and Brandon Abbey.

Mrs. Brandon presides over courtship, life, death, inheritance, and misunderstandings resolved.

Whatever happens, and we’re rarely in suspense, it’s the gentle humor and the sharp characterizations of even the minor players which make “getting there half the fun.”

The horror of Mrs. Grant, Hilary’s mother, can be enjoyed because we know she cannot resist an eventual return to sunny Calabria.

And Sir Edmund Pridham, Mrs. Brandon’s elderly “trustee,” who is willing to marry her when he believes she is about to make an “unsuitable” match, but is mightily relieved to discover otherwise—just in the nick of time.

While each book stands alone, reading them as a group provides a chance to look forward and backward at changing relationships.

Knowing that these books were written more or less in “real time” lends a poignancy to the last summer of peace and “civilization as we know it.”