A Double Affair: Volume 26 - Paperback

by Angela Thirkell (Author)

A "charming troupe" of Barsetshire inhabitants celebrate a spate of marriages--while one young woman bemoans her prospects--in this novel of 1950s English life (The New York Times).

The locals are all talking about the upcoming wedding of the vicar of Hatch End to the much-loved Miss Merriman--in fact, the couple's friends and neighbors seem even more excited than the bride- and groom-to-be. But that's to be expected when a couple of a certain age tie the knot, because it reminds everyone that it's never too late for love. And though Edith Graham is increasingly gloomy about landing a husband, the romantic spirit of the event just might be contagious . . .

"Where Trollope would have been content to arouse a chuckle, [Thirkell] is constantly provoking us to hilarious laughter. . . . To read her is to get the feeling of knowing Barsetshire folk as well as if one had been born and bred in the county." --Kirkus Reviews

"[Thirkell's] talent for easy, light characterization does not seem to be flagging." --The Times Literary Supplement

Author Biography

Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was a British author whose ability to produce one book a year, every year, and set in that year blurred the lines between novelist and social historian. Like so many of the writers that she admired--Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot--Thirkell shared their X-ray vision: an unmatched ability to assess the hypocrisies, desires, and prejudices of her characters and, better still, play them for laughs. Her biggest literary project, the Barsetshire Chronicles, consists of twenty-nine novels, each acting as another slice of English country life; a utopian vision of bucolic countryside, grand manors, and village f?tes.