Overview

Born in London in 1890, Angela Thirkell was Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s granddaughter, J.M. Barrie’s goddaughter and a cousin of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. John Collier painted her portrait and she was drawn by John Singer Sargent and Thea Proctor. Between 1931 and her death in 1961, Angela published more than thirty books in a variety of genres. She began with the acclaimed family memoir Three Houses and later settled on her amusing Barsetshire series, inspired by Anthony Trollope but set in the present day. Angela Thirkell: A Writer’s Life tells the author’s story from her Kensington childhood to her two marriages and the birth of three sons, Graham McInnes, Colin MacInnes and Lance Thirkell, all of whom also entered the literary world. The book traces her decade in Australia where she wrote for magazines and newspapers and made radio broadcasts, followed by her return to London and her fortuitous meeting with a young publisher called Jamie Hamilton, which lead to her bestselling Barsetshire novels.

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9781913491246

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Reviews

Hall's new biography of Angela Thirkell is detailed, highly readable, and revealing. Her wide-ranging research and a gallery of illustrations not seen before thoroughly revise our understanding of the formative influences on Thirkell's writing and life. --Kate Macdonald, author of Novelists Against Social Change: Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920-1960 This is the book all Angela Thirkell enthusiasts have been wishing for. It illustrates so many instances of how she translated her own life into the fictional world of Barsetshire, and for those who haven't yet discovered her it will make them want to make that journey for themselves. --Penny Alred, former chair of the Angela Thirkell Society

Author Information

Anne Hall was born in Boston, Massachusetts and studied English and Comparative Literature at Radcliffe College and the University of Washington. After taking a PhD in French at the University of California, Berkeley, she moved permanently to France. For several years she taught English at Université de Tours and Université d’Aix-Marseille. Since then she has published a series of articles and books on Daphne Du Maurier, George Du Maurier and their ancestors, most recently The Du Mauriers Just as They Were (Unicorn, 2018).

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