Imprint
- Virago
- Virago
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Second World War fiction
Originally published in 1948, Love Among the Ruins is a clever and quintessentially British classic in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series. Now available as a Virago Modern Classic.
'You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own' New York Times
It's the summer of 1947, and peacetime has brought new challenges to Barsetshire. Beliers Priory, once a military hospital during the War, has now become a flourishing preparatory school for boys run by Leslie and Philip Winter.
When Charles Belton is hired as the new school master, six young people are thrown together in a web of flirtations and misunderstandings: Charles and his elder brother, Naval Captain Freddy Belton; Susan Dean, now Red Cross Depot Librarian, and her glamorous sister Jessica, an actress in thrall to the theatre; pragmatic Lucy Marling and her brother Oliver. And with the old social order in ruins, the scene is set for a delicious summer of comic - and romantic - possibilities.
Love Among the Ruins is a delightful, clever and wryly poignant classic, and the 17th novel in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.
Praise for Love Among the Ruins
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You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own - New York Times
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The novels are a delight, with touches of E. F. Benson, E. M. Delafield and P. G. Wodehouse - Independent on Sunday
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Charming, very funny indeed. Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself - Alexander McCall Smith
Angela Thirkell
Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was the eldest daughter of John William Mackail, a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant, and Margaret Burne-Jones. Her relatives included the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and her grandfather was J. M. Barrie. She was educated in London and Paris, and began publishing articles and stories in the 1920s. In 1931 she brought out her first book, a memoir entitled Three Houses, and in 1933 her comic novel High Rising - set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope - met with great success. She went on to write nearly thirty Barsetshire novels, as well as several further works of fiction and non-fiction. She was twice married and had four children.
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