A review by dashausfrau
Coronation Summer by Angela Thirkell
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.