Kind of long. A lot in this one about post-war Britain and the actually worsening conditions, especially the rationing.
In this one, a war widow and her sister-in-law come to live in Barchester. The widow, Peggy, is still in her twenties and very attractive. At least two of the local men fall in love with her, one of them becoming very much a nuisance to his family because he's never been in love before and is behaving with all the reasonableness of a 3-year-old.
Anyway, eminently suitable engagements will happen, and there will be lots of talking about food (or the lack thereof).
Mostly an okay book, but not as many funny or memorable bits. ( )

Following on the heels of Peace Breaks Out, in this novel the people of Barsetshire are adapting to daily life after World War II. Some semblance of country society is beginning to re-emerge. The arrival of a young widow and her unmarried sister-in-law has everyone abuzz. Single men have their eyes on Mrs Arbuthnot while her sister-in-law is content with settling into their cottage and going birding in the surrounding countryside. As with most of Angela Thirkell’s novels, the reader will immediately begin speculating about who will marry whom and be rewarded with some pleasant surprises by the end. This storyline unfolds amid other developments in the lives of recurring characters. Lydia and Noel Merton, who made their respective debuts in much earlier novels, have now matured into two of my favorites and have prominent roles in this book. Kate Carter, Lavinia Brandon, and the Dean family are all here too. It’s worth noting that Thirkell’s form of satire is sometimes dated and makes me wince, but at other times her send up of English country life is highly amusing. Not much happens, and yet quite a lot happens, and it all turns out well in the end. ( )

This is Thirkell's 1947 book (she wrote one a year, regular as clockwork), with the author still deep in the gloom of postwar shortages and bubbling over with the full fury of her hatred for "Them" (the term she always uses for Clement Attlee's Labour government). Even the weather somehow seems to be affected by the depressing situation, and there's no sign of anything that could be called a summer, even by English standards.

Nonetheless, the Thirkell family has to be fed, so she casts around and - apparently slightly to her own surprise - discovers that there are two or three male characters in Barsetshire she hasn't got around to marrying off yet. With the help of a couple of unattached women drafted in from British India to swell the cast, she manages to cobble together a new iteration of her usual romantic comedy plot, and spice it up a bit with a few set-pieces: the Red Cross bookbinding exhibition (no, really!), a special Speech Day to mark the Birketts' retirement from Southbridge School, and some interesting amateur dramatics. In passing we also get a few more glimpses into the county's literary life, and there's a treat for ornithologists as Thirkell - who clearly can't be bothered to get the details right - simply makes up a dozen or more previously unknown bird species, with the anglo-indian stengah (or "whisky-and-soda bird") in pride of place.

In fact, I sometimes had to wonder if Thirkell was getting a bit bored with the format she'd trapped herself into by this time, and was trying to break out a little - the attentive reader will spot quite a few buried dirty jokes that would count as quite risqué by 1940s standards, but which are so cunningly concealed in the text that the respectable middle-class ladies who read her books could always pretend not to have noticed that they were there.

The lawyer Colin Keith, who is the comic romantic lead this time, is spending his summer on what is evidently the most boring project Thirkell could imagine, preparing a new edition of the classic railway-law text Lemon on Running Powers. She wasn't to know, since she was presumably writing this at the end of 1946, but she could hardly have picked a hotter topic, because the 1947 Transport Act (passed in August) was just about to nationalise the railway industry. Whatever Colin wrote in 1947 would have had to be revised completely after January 1948...

The stone-age politic attitudes and unconcealed snobbery are more tedious than offensive after all this time, and are still - just about - compensated for by Thirkell's acute and often very funny observation of the narrow range of people she considers worth noticing, and by her always-brilliant dialogues. Not a book anyone who hasn't already fallen for the charm of her characters need bother with, but if you do like this sort of thing then it's another necessary fix to keep you going for a while longer... ( )

Tiresome and uninteresting.

Only read a few pages ( )