The Old Bank House

'Charming, very funny indeed. Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself' Alexander McCall Smith
Edgewood Rectory is set in an ancient landscape, but the Grantly family are very much of their time. In the uncertain world that has emerged since the outbreak of peace, the Rector and his wife are bewildered by the challenges facing their eldest children: Eleanor, longing for more excitement than can be found in the Red Cross Library; and Tom, struggling to readjust to student life at Oxford after his military service.
When their elderly neighbour, Miss Sowerby, sells her beloved Old Bank House to gregarious self-made man Sam Adams, she is comforted that the house will be restored to its former beauty. But a home needs a mistress - and amid the flirtations and misunderstandings of a Barsetshire summer, Sam discovers that even a contented widower can be surprised by love.
[thumbnails of CHEERFULNESS BREAKS IN, MARLING HALL, GROWING UP, THE HEADMISTRESS, MISS BUNTING, PEACE BREAKS OUT]

Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was the eldest daughter of John William Mackail, a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant, and Margaret Burne-Jones. Her relatives included the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and her grandfather was J. M. Barrie. She was educated in London and Paris, and began publishing articles and stories in the 1920s. In 1931 she brought out her first book, a memoir entitled Three Houses, and in 1933 her comic novel High Rising - set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope - met with great success. She went on to write nearly thirty Barsetshire novels, as well as several further works of fiction and non-fiction. She was twice married and had four children.