Published in the same year as The Demon in the House, Wild Strawberries is a charming and extremely funny but rather conventional romance which, if it had been Angela Thirkell’s only novel, might (still undeservedly!) be called a “woman’s novel” of the type to be read while eating a box of chocolates, but it contains countless gems of pointed humor and the seeds of the social satire that is to come. Neither Thirkell nor her contemporary readers were aware that this was an early installment in what would become a saga—the county in which the action takes place is still not named. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how beautifully Thirkell works with her various threads: she will have no difficulty connecting Laura Morland from High Rising with the characters in this installment. Loosely speaking, Wild Strawberries is the story of twenty-three-year-old Mary Prescott, who spends the summer with her uncle’s wife’s family, the Leslies. She falls in love with David, the spoiled playboy youngest son, but ends up marrying John, the staid widower of seven years. Put like this, it sounds scarcely strong enough to hold up a short story, but it is more than enough!

When I think of this book I think of English country life with a golden haze over it—this is a romantic paean not to love itself but to the “lost” country house life of Angela’s youth. [Read more…]