Angela Thirkell (Angela Margaret Thirkell) Biography

English novelist, born in London, educated at St Paul's Girls' School. The mother of Colin McInnes, she was related to Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling, and Stanley Baldwin. Her first book, Three Houses (1931), an entertaining memoir of her Edwardian childhood, was followed by over thirty novels about life among the country gentry, which were very popular in the 1930s and 1940s. These include Wild Strawberries (1934), Pomfret Towers (1938), The Brandons (1939), and Cheerfulness Breaks In (1940), which focused on the fortunes (both fateful and financial) of families in Barsetshire, the fictional county borrowed in tribute to Trollope. After the Second World War, Thirkell faithfully recorded the rancour of the upper-middle classes against austerity measures, egalitarian attitudes, and the Labour Government in novels such as Peace Breaks Out (1946), Private Enterprise (1947), Love Among the Ruins (1948), and Coronation Summer (1953).