Novels of Instruction: Thirkell in the 1930s

Abstract

In the first scholarly study of Angela Thirkell, Jill N Levin observes that Thirkell created ‘an irreplaceable record of the imaginations and yearnings of the classes which interested her — the gentry and the professional upper middle class’.¹ David Pryce-Jones notes that Thirkell ‘responded immediately in her novels to shifts in the system, so that unreflectingly she wrote a fictionalised journalism’,² which agrees with what Thirkell had said of her novelist alter ego Mrs Morland: ‘“She has the makings of an excellent reporter in her if only she could keep to the point”’.³ Thirkell’s occasionally riotous comic satire presented contemporary anxieties about class and failing traditions by employing ‘nostalgic melancholy and satirical malice’.⁴ Even though she could be stridently conservative, her critiques of social change sometimes insert unexpectedly progressive notes into how she depicts contemporary lives. Alison Light notes that studying Thirkell, among other conservative novelists, would show that ‘their interest would none the less lie as much in their modernity as in their reiteration of well-worked national and political themes’.⁵ Thirkell’s relentlessly unsentimental view of the housewife’s daily round contradicted the imagery of advertisements, for example, and made female-centred commentary possible within a conservative framework.⁶