Angela Thirkell
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Angela Thirkell (January 30, 1890 - January 29, 1961) was an English and Australian novelist. She also published one novel, Trooper to Southern Cross, under the pseudonym Leslie Parker.
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[edit] Biography
Thirkell was the grand-daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, the cousin of Rudyard Kipling, and the mother of the novelist Colin MacInnes. With her second husband, George Lancelot Allnut Thirkell (m. 1920), she led an unfamiliar lower-middle class and, to her, deeply repugnant life in Melbourne, in a house that lacked even indoor plumbing. She separated from her husband, leaving Australia for good (without his knowledge) in November 1929, but remained determinedly "Mrs. Thirkell" for the rest of her life (Strickland 153 and 168).
Lacking money, she solicited the fare to London from her godfather, J. M. Barrie (of "Peter Pan" fame), and used the sum intended for her return ticket for two single passages, for herself and her youngest son, Lance. (Gould 43) She claimed that her parents were aging, and needed her. But she certainly preferred her comfortable life in London and her success as a novelist (which began with her second novel, High Rising, published in 1933) to either of her marriages. Her "attitude to any man to whom she attracted was summed up in the remark: 'It's very peaceful with no husbands,'" which "was quoted by the 'Observer' newspaper in its column 'Sayings of the Week'" (Strickland 164).
[edit] Works
She set all, but a handful of her novels in Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire, the fictional English county that Trollope created and developed in the six novels known as the "Barsetshire Chronicles". An alert reader of contemporary fiction, Thirkell also borrowed freely from such now-arcane titles as John Galsworthy's The Country House, from which, for example, she lifted the name "Worsted," which she used to christen the village setting of her 1936 novel, August Folly. She also quoted frequently, and without attribution, from novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Thirkell published a new novel every year, which she regularly denigrated (usually in correspondence with her editor, Jamie Hamilton of Hamish Hamilton, Inc.) as "new wine" in an "old bottle." She professed horror at the idea that her circle of well educated and upper-middle-class friends might read her fiction: she expected them to prefer, as she did, such writers as Gibbon, Austen, Dickens, Milton, and Proust. (She took the epigraph to "T 1951," as she called it, from Proust: "Les gens du monde se représentent volontiers les livres comme une espèce de cube dont une face est enlevée, si bien que l'auteur se dépêche de 'faire entrer' dedans les personnes qu'il rencontre," or "Society people think that books are a sort of cube, one side of which the author opens the better to insert into it the people he meets."
Her books of the 1930s in particular had a satiric exuberance, as in Pomfret Towers, which sends up village ways, aristocratic folly and middle-class aspirations. Three Houses (1931, Oxford University Press; repeatedly reprinted) is a short childhood memoir which simultaneously displays Thirkell's precociously finished style, her lifelong melancholy, and her idealization of her grandfather, Edward Burne-Jones. Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934; republished in 1939 as What Happened on the Boat) "is concerned with the experiences of a number of English and Australian passengers aboard a troop-ship, the Rudolstadt, on their way back to Australia immediately after World War I. It is particularly interesting for its depiction of the Australian 'digger'; his anti-authoritarianism, larrikinism, and, at the same time, his loyalty to those whom he respects."[1]
In the 1940s, her work was colored by the war and the war efforts. The home front figured particularly in Cheerfulness Breaks In, from 1940, showing how women saw their loved ones off to the front, and Northbridge Rectory, which showed how housewives coped with shortages, among many other annoyances of wartime life. These books, which also include Marling Hall, Growing Up and The Headmistress, provide a vibrant picture depicting the attitude and struggle -- as well as resigned good cheer -- of women during the war. Even a book that did not deal exclusively with the war effort, Miss Bunting, addressed changes in society the war had wrought, as the title character, a governess, grows to middle age and wonders how to live out her life, and where her ambitions might take her as the world turns upside down. These books provide a time capsule of the age.
Later books in the 1950s became more romantic and less contemporary. Among these, The Old Bank House in particular shows Thirkell concerned with the rise of the merchant class, her own prejudices evident, but giving way to grudging respect for industriousness and goodhearted generosity. Later books are simpler romances. The romance The Duke's Daughter deals in a way more directly than some of her others with descendants of Trollope's Barsetshire characters. Her final book, Three Score and Ten, was left unfinished at her death, but was completed later by C.A. Lejeune.
Thirkell showed a keen social sense and a lively eye for the telling detail of everyday life. Many of her books remain in print.
[edit] Further reading
- Barbara Burrell, Angela Thirkell's World: A Complete Guide to the People and Places of Barsetshire. [1].
- Tony Gould, "Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes" (Penguin, 1983). A well-written and extremely informative biography of Thirkell's second son, the novelist Colin MacInnes.
- Margot Strickland, Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1977). Unfortunately the only biography of Thirkell in existence, it is available from the author via the UK Angela Thirkell Society. The author received full cooperation from Thirkell's youngest son Lance. Both factually and tonally, her contempt for Thirkell's work is evident.
- The Land of Lost Content (M.A. thesis, Washington University, 1986): a more sympathetic interpretation of Thirkell's novels and her psychology
- A shorter -- albeit slightly more critical -- analysis of Thirkell was published in the New Yorker several years ago. Article by Lee, Hermione, New Yorker; 10/07/96, Vol. 72 Issue 30.
- Thirkell, Three Houses (1931, Oxford University Press; repeatedly reprinted)
