Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Three Houses | 1931 | Angela Thirkell | Buy |
| 2 | Tribute for Harriette | 1936 | Angela Thirkell | Buy |
Angela Thirkell published Three Houses in 1931, two years before her first Barsetshire novel, and it remains among her most distinctive works. The memoir covers a handful of years in her childhood spent between London and the East Sussex village of Rottingdean, where her grandparents Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones had their summer home. Thirkell writes about her grandfather with open affection, and the portrait of Burne-Jones in his studio and garden is one of the warmest things she ever wrote.
The Fortunes of Harriette (1936) is a biography of Harriette Wilson, the celebrated Regency courtesan whose 1825 memoirs caused a scandal by naming her aristocratic clients. Thirkell brought her novelist’s instincts to the subject, treating Wilson’s life as social comedy and using the biography to sketch the manners of early 19th-century London high society. It is lighter in tone than most biography of the period.
Together the two books show Thirkell as a writer with historical range beyond the Barsetshire novels. Three Houses is occasionally reprinted and tends to surprise readers who come to it expecting something like her fiction. It is quieter and more personal, but the sharpness of observation is the same.