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The career of Angela Thirkell, a chronicler of twentieth-century English country life in the so-called \"Barsetshire novels,\" provides an engaging case study of how an author exploited her interpretation of Austen for literary profit. Kathryn Sutherland illustrates how R. W. Chapman's Oxford edition of Austen's works, the standard scholarly text until the early twenty-first century, privileged this view for decades by ignoring in his annotations the historical context for Austen's work in favor of less threatening topics such as period dress (3350). [...]Thirkell's life experience, including her absence from England during the literary ferment of the 1920s and her exposure to intellectual mentors from an earlier era, led this well-read, successful author to maintain a late-Victorian rather than a modern view of Jane Austen. Angela Mackail attended St. Paul's Girls' School and knew five languages, including Latin and Greek, but despite her cleverness and exposure to the literary and artistic circles of her family, she did not aspire to university life (Strickland 15-19).

When Jesus meets the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s well in John 4, it is a meeting between two colonial subjects in the Roman Empire. In this encounter we find the Samaritan Woman as a triply marginalised body, a woman subject to multiple, intersecting forms of oppression within her patriarchal context. Identified as a Samaritan Woman, Jewish rabbis regarded her as unclean, impure, and being menstruous from birth. It can also be deduced that she is an outcast in her own society because she comes to draw from the well at noon, the hottest part of the day when people did not usually fetch water. This Samaritan Woman is nameless, landless and powerless in an imperial, colonial and patriarchal context. The poem of Diana Ferrus, I’ve come to take you home, in memory of Sarah Baartman, highlights how Baartman was dehumanised and treated as a sexual object by European colonisers. Through a postcolonial reading of John 4, I consider the intersections between the Samaritan Woman and the early life of Sara Baartman in their respective colonial contexts and invite the reader, as the poem invites Baartman, to come home to Africa and resist Western European imperial and colonial patterns and tendencies.ContributionThis article has interdisciplinary implications. This is an interdisciplinary study in the sense that it offers a biblical interpretation of John 4 that is informed by the life of Sara Baartman that has been uncovered through anthropology, history and sociology. It is also integrating the field of postcolonial biblical hermeneutics with the theory of intersectionality.

In the 1930s, she ditched the more overt referencing of styles, and hit her stride with gently mocking social satires such as High Rising, that have value today as nostalgic reminders of the period. Her dialogue is frequently very funny and the novels are a delight, with touches of E F Benson, E M Delafield, and P G Wodehouse. There was one odd book out, Trooper to the Southern Cross, about an Australian troopship in the aftermath of the First World War, written under a pseudonym. Her later novels explored life on the home front during the Second World War, as well as the changes in society brought by the upheaval of war. Even more than her earlier works, the books are time capsules of the period, but as [Angela Thirkell] aged, her novels turned into simplistic romances.

  Starting in the 1930s, [Angela Thirkell] wrote 29 social comedies set in the fictional English village of Barsetshire, and now Virago has reprinted two from the series. In High Rising, novelist Laura fears that her neighbour, George, is about to be tricked into marrying his scheming secretary.

Dear Editor, I was reading County Chronicle by Angela Thirkell recently and came upon the following letter sent in the 19th century by the Duke of Omnium to his son Lord Silverbridge when he was thinking of standing for Parliament.

Uncle Al lamented that he couldn't credit the author of that piece because (he knows this is hard to believe) he had misplaced his copy. Mark Storry, an alert reader in Monticello (at least he's more alert than Uncle Al), sent him the answer: Meanwhile, EnBW has instituted extra controls on access to the restricted area, so they might be thinking that the keys were stolen, not lost. This makes Uncle Al wonder whether the keys in question were locked up, where the box containing the keys was located and - more important - the location of the keys to open the box that held the missing keys. If an arrangement like that was in place, Uncle Al would suggest looking into whether somebody who had legitimate access to the security areas might have tired of trying to find Kurt or Hans to get the key to unlock the box to get the key to unlock the box to get the key to unlock the box to open the door to the security area so he could buy a knackwurst from the snack machine. Once, when he had the keys, had he simply kept them? Would he fear to admit it (or possibly be reluctant to forgo his newly streamlined access to knackwurst)?

1957 City of Spades - MacInnes's landmark debut, set in Notting Hill's immigrant community, was one of the first novels to vividly explore racial issues in modern Britain.

One of [Angela Thirkell]'s characters is Laura Morland, an author of mysteries - one a year - set in the fashion world. \"Not but what they are all the same,\" Mrs. Morland explains, \"because my publisher says that pays better.\" Thirkell's novels are all the same, too. If you cut only the scenes that take place during tea, half of Thirkell would be missing. What interests Thirkell is people talking, and the nonsense they talk. It makes no difference who. It might be the chaotic English of a Mixo-Lydian refugee in a novel set during the war or the inane chatter of the beautiful Rose Fairweather, whose favorite adjectives are \"dispiriting\" and \"shattering,\" though she has never been dispirited or shattered. Or the effusive biographer George Knox who, in a fit of illness in the first of these Barsetshire novels, says to his friend, Mrs. Morland, \"Even Wordsworth was more interesting that I am at this moment.\"

Described in the Dictionary of National Biography as having a magnetic if acid personality, she wrote with a dispatch which conceals skill. Her characters are not drawn in great depth but that there are depths is made plain: as the weary Lydia prepares to feed the evacuee children, \"the well-known smell of children and stew filled the air and Lydia wished for a moment everyone were dead.\" It is a sentence which sums up the suppressed anxieties with which Lydia is living, but its sense includes the common but unspoken apprehension of the horrors then approaching Britain. It is only one indication of that gift for \"crystal melancholy\" which [Elizabeth Bowen] also noted as a characteristic of [Angela Thirkell]'s work. It is, perhaps, most noticeable in what must be the later novels: there are at least 32 of these but to find them I must apply to places such as MacNaughten's Bookshop in Edinburgh and endless inter-library loans. The Brandons, Lydia (whose handshake reminds a young man of that time he broke his wrist) and [Rose], Lords Stoke and Pomfret with their wives and offspring, [Eileen] at the pub and Mrs Morland with her demented hair and typewriter, Mr Miller in his vicarage or Noel Merton in his chambers are figures who reappear in many of the Thirkell novels. There is always a consistency in their presence. Time has moved forward with them as well as with the reader, and even if they are only backstage or in the wings for the main action of a book, they are summoned to provide whatever it was they originally had to offer, only more so.