Pomfret Towers: A Comfort Read Set in Downton Abbey (Plus a Bad Book Cover)

Nice cover on this Virago Modern Classic edition. It reminds me of a vintage travel poster. 

I started reading Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series last fall, when I was in dire need of a comfort read. Beginning in 1933, Angela Mackail Thirkell (sister of Denis Mackail, who wrote the charming Greenery Street) wrote 29 novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, the same county as Trollope's novels. So far I've read five of the first six and have found all of them mostly delightful.  If the words "English country house party in the 1930s" pique your interest as they do mine, then this is quite possibly the book for you.

Pomfret Towers is #6 in the series and was published in 1938. The story begins with an invitation to a weekend house party. (I kept imagining it set in pre-war Highclere Castle AKA Downton Abbey, which I just visited in the UK; I'll post about it soon). The elderly Lord Pomfret is having a group for the weekend and is looking for some young people, so he invites Guy and Alice Barton, the young adult children of one of his tenants. Mr. Barton is a successful architect and his wife is a successful writer of historical novels. Guy works for his father and Alice, shy and delicate, is terrified of the idea of spending a weekend with a lot of smart and fashionable people. She warily accepts after Lord Pomfret tells her to bring along her friends Roddy and Sally Wicklow. Rowdy works for Lord Pomfret's agent, and Sally is a quintessential country girl who loves dogs and horses and is quite jolly. 

The house party gets under way and Alice is taken under the wing of the beautiful Phoebe Rivers, a sort of cousin to Lord Pomfret, who is visiting with her brother Julian, a rather spoiled artist-type, and their overbearing mother, Hermione, another novelist. Mrs. Rivers' primary purpose in the visit is to get Phoebe paired off with Lord Pomfret's heir apparent, Giles Foster. The house also party includes Mr. Johns, one of the partners of Mrs. Rivers' publishing firm, who is not convinced that the income from her books is worth the trouble of putting up with her. 

Most of the story is taken up with the possible pairings-off between the various young people and the chagrin of Mrs. Rivers when these silly youths don't follow her wishes. There are also some very funny bits about writers and publishers. Our omniscient narrator gives us some of Mr. Johns' more amusing thoughts, as well as Lady Pomfret's steadfast secretary Miss Merriman, in whom the unbearable Mrs. Rivers has met her match.

. . . [Mrs. Rivers] was forced to fall back on the interesting subject of herself and tell Miss Merriman how many signed photographs she gave away last year. If Miss Merriman had had real tact she would have asked whether Mrs. Rivers could possibly spare her one, but she merely remarked that she must get one of Mrs. Rivers' books from the library as soon as she had time to do some reading, and that Lady Pomfret had had Mrs. Rivers' last book on the [waiting] list ever since it came out but hadn't got it yet. Whether Miss Merriman knew how annoying this was to Mrs. Rivers, who have liked the libraries to buy enough copies for all the subscribers, we are not in a position to say. (p. 129)

I really enjoyed this book -- it was light and funny, if a bit predictable. It was pretty easy to guess who was going to end up with whom, though there were some amusing minor plot twists. Also, in previous Thirkell books there have been occasional racist remarks which made me uncomfortable (though I do realize anti-Semitism was pretty common among the middle and upper classes during that period); this book, thankfully, didn't have any that I remember. 

And now for some alternate book covers! 

This cover is from the 1980s. Is that supposed to be Deborah Kerr? Whoever she is, she looks far too old and glamorous unless she's supposed to be Mrs. Rivers. And what is that bizarre cord wrapped around her shoulder and bosom? is she being lassoed by the guy hiding in the bushes? It's all very strange.

I suppose this one is better, it's the Moyer-Bell edition from 2007. Their covers are generally good (though I have found some egregious typographical errors in the text). I don't know enough about fashion history to know if this dress is period-appropriate. I don't have this edition so I don't know the source of the cover image.

The original cover. I do love how it explains Thirkell is the "author of 'August Folly' and other delightful novels.' Even her own publisher thinks her books are delightful, so it must be true!

Anyway, of the five Thirkell novels I've read so far, this was definitely my favorite and I'm very much looking forward to the next 24 (!) books in the series. I already own about a dozen in Moyer-Bell editions that I picked up at Half-Price Books back in Texas, though there are a few volumes in the series which are difficult to find and can be pricey.

After considering, I have decided to count this as my Classic by a Woman Author -- Thirkell wrote this book eighty years ago and it's still in print, so I'm calling that a classic. That makes ten books read for the Back to the Classics challenge, only two left to go!

Crome Yellow: If Barbara Pym Visited Downton Abbey, But Not

A couple of years ago I found this Vintage paperback while shopping at Shakespeare and Company. It was short, it was by Aldous Huxley, whom I knew only as the author of Brave New World, and it was about a country house in England in the 1920s. Sold! I finally picked it up last week because it had a color in the title, and because I had recently read Civil To Strangers by Barbara Pym, one of my favorite authors. In the introduction it mentioned how much she'd loved this book. 

So, I thought this might be a little like reading a Barbara Pym book set in Downton Abbey, but most likely with fewer vicars and less mentions of cauliflower cheese. Published in 1921, it is the story of a Bright Young Thing named Denis Stone, who has been invited to spend some time over the summer at a country house called Crome, owned by the delightfully eccentric Wimbush family. Denis is smitten with the owner's daughter Anne, and spends his time struggling to woo her and write more poetry. The house is filled with various other guests, including historians, artists, and philosophers. The novella has a meandering pace in which not much happens except for witty asides, snark, and long tangents which includes sermons, and the back story of the family who owned the Crome estate. Here is one of my favorite examples:

As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future, their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.

(Aldous Huxley wrote this in 1921, clearly not having anticipated the invention of smart phones.)

Some of the book is eerily predictive and insightful -- a pastor predicts the coming of another Great War. Another segment is a spot-on commentary that would not be out of place in the current Time's Up Movement; in it, the host's daughter, Anna, defends herself to an amorous visiting artist:

You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly, you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.    

I think I liked this book more in theory than in its execution. This is normally exactly the sort of book that I should love yet somehow, I did not. I didn't have any patience with Denis and his pathetic attempts at romancing Anne when she was clearly not interested. Some of the side characters were amusing, particularly the uncle who has devoted himself to the history of Crome, but I did get somewhat bored with the philosophizing which often went on for pages and pages. For such a short novel (only 170 pages), it took me a surprisingly long time to finish it. Also I was annoyed to realize that I could have easily downloaded it for free instead of paying 12 euros for it. I also wished I could have just read Barbara Pym for this challenge instead -- I still have A Few Green Leaves on my owned and unread shelves (published in 1980, so it didn't work for this challenge). Well, I have crossed off my list if nothing else.

I'm counting this as my Classic with a Color in the Title for the Back to the Classics Challenge.