thenovelbook's review against another edition
2.0
This book is not connected to Angela Thirkell's main body of work, the Barsetshire novels set in the mid-20th century. This book is a fictional account of one Fanny Harcourt, who together with her best friend and her father, goes to London to be part of the festivities of Queen Victoria's coronation. Parts of it remind me of Jane Austen's juvenilia. It's mildly amusing, but not all that funny or memorable.
dashausfrau's review
4.0
I'm excited to find a new author from the 30s. This book was especially fun - a story about early Victorian life, written in the 30s. Angela Thirkell had to have a closer perspective than we do now, right? _Coronation Summer_ is something like an Austen novel from the point of view of a Lydia Bennett character (except a generation+ later of course). She is frivolous, under-educated, not always very kind to her BFF, & eager to record gossip & the riots at public events. Drunks fighting, deaths, & destruction of property were normal at all sports & public display, according to Fanny Harcourt, & of course they were, what else can you expect from the lower classes?
The story also drives home the precariousness of a girl's position / reputation / life. This is a comedy, so things turn out all right, thanks to the White Knight, but nobody would have felt any pity for Fanny if she had ended up poor & unmarried, & therefore less than nobody in the mid 19th century. She would have spent long, threadbare years hating herself because a man wrote a poem TO her. Drawing anyone's notice or being the recipient of a letter from an eligible bachelor made one a tart, apparently, as if someone could help if a man wrote her a letter. What should she have done? Burned the letter immediately? Should a person, at 17, have the judgement to encourage only the steady, dependable suitor among a group of men that she's just met? Ok, you get the idea.
The story also drives home the precariousness of a girl's position / reputation / life. This is a comedy, so things turn out all right, thanks to the White Knight, but nobody would have felt any pity for Fanny if she had ended up poor & unmarried, & therefore less than nobody in the mid 19th century. She would have spent long, threadbare years hating herself because a man wrote a poem TO her. Drawing anyone's notice or being the recipient of a letter from an eligible bachelor made one a tart, apparently, as if someone could help if a man wrote her a letter. What should she have done? Burned the letter immediately? Should a person, at 17, have the judgement to encourage only the steady, dependable suitor among a group of men that she's just met? Ok, you get the idea.
More...