High Rising (Angela Thirkell Barsetshire Series)

In High Rising, Mrs. Morland, a widowed author, must attend to the deeper problems of country life while her son Tony drives everyone to distraction with his amazing combination of toy trains. Here Mrs. Thirkell demonstrates the characteristic style for which she is known and for which readers love her. This is fiction replete with gentle irony, grave absurdity, and urbane understatement.

If that gives an idea of the flavor and style that might be enjoyed in her books, I can add that this one chronicles the dizzy doings of Laura Morland, a novelists, who juggles the demands of four sons, her publisher, her secretary, her formidable maid Stoker, and a friend George Knox whom most think should be more than a friend to her. The custom of "coming to tea" sets them all interacting. Watch for the number of verbs Angela Thirkell can employ - from plunge, to insinuate - to describe how characters can enter a room.


A Long-forgotten Treasure Returns!   July 27, 2002
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

The divine Angela Thirkell, to my mind a latter-day Jane Austen, wrote her simply wonderful novels about upper-class village life in pre-war England, in a series of 40 or so novels that are simply irresistable. Her plots captured a time, a mind-set, and a way of life that is long gone, and in fact, her later novels, set just after the war, already reflected a desperate nostalgia for a never-to-return past.

Never mind, though, because "High Rising," one of the earliest of Thirkell's series, is a delight you won't soon forget. The plot centers, as always, on a blithering author whose high-piled hair is continually in disarray, often spewing hairpins at the most inappropriate of times. A widow, she has raised several strapping sons, and is now engaged in trying to educate her youngest, the irrepressible and impossibly boring 8-year-old, Tony. To do so, she must churn out novels, and to that end, she employs a secretary named Anne Todd. And so the plot begins.

Anne is a selfless creature who uncomplainingly cares for her ailing elderly mother, a task that is draining her almost to illness. But plucky pre-war Britishers of a certain class never complained, and neither does Anne. The plot thickens when a truly horrid gold-digger appears to become secretary to another author, and proceeds to wreak terrible havoc on this close-knit society. She is truly an "incubus," which becomes her secret nickname.

So. What will become of the incubus? Will she succeed in her nefarious plot to marry wealthy Geoffrey, a scholarly author who doesn't have a clue? If so, what of Geoffrey's teenaged daughter? Who will mind the dogs? Will High Rising (Tony's prep school) survive yet another class of noxious boys? Will the good village doctor, besotted by Anne, be successful in his gentlemanly courtship?

And most of all...can anyone resist this book??