Boston: Little, Brown, 1955.
Along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh was one of the Big Three British mystery novelists of what is now called the Golden Age. I’ve always enjoyed Sayers’s books (still very popular), though I never cared at all for Christie (still enormously popular), but it puzzles me why Marsh’s stores featuring DCI Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard have sort of fallen by the wayside.
London: Heinemann, 2005.
Georgette Heyer, who single-handedly invented the genre of “Regency romance,” was noted for (among other things) the accuracy and detail of her research.
NY: Berkley, 2008.
This is the second in Bowen’s most recent mystery series and it’s not bad — as long as you’re not expecting hard-boiled noir, shoot-outs, car chases, or the Mafia. Lady Georgiana of Rannoch is the half-sister of a duke and while she has the Swiss private school education and the social contacts, she has barely a shilling to her name.
NY: Berkley, 2007.
This is the first offering in Bowen’s third series of humorous murder mysteries, this time set in the spring of 1932 and featuring the young Lady Georgiana, half-sister of the Duke of Glen Garry and Rannoch (known to all as “Binky”), and granddaughter of “the least attractive of Queen Victoria’s daughters.”
NY: Random House, 1984.
Prof. Vinnie Miner, a specialist in children’s literature and folk culture at what passes for Cornell, is small in stature and plain of face, now in her fifties and well practiced at living by (and for) herself. She’s selfish, in a constructive sort of way, but the fact that she was raised to be a lady generally wins out. (Though her neighbors had better keep an eye on their roses.)
NY: St. Martin, 2009.
The ruling elite in Britain — originally simply the warrior class — adopted the Aristotelian concept of “government by the best,” the author says, to reinforce their deep sense of natural superiority, the “long process of collective self-hypnosis by which aristocrats convinced themselves that their distinctive qualities made them indispensible to the nation.” This argument of hereditary superiority was still being made in 1999 even as most of the hereditary peers were being expelled from the upper house of Parliament.
London: Faber & Faber, 1981.
It’s sometimes difficult for Americans to understand how the titled class in Great Britain manages to hang on and on, in what is supposed to be a democracy. In fact, under various Labour governments, Britain has been far more radically socialist than the United States — but the dukes and earls and barons have always survived. Is it just the British love of tradition? Probably not.
NY: Putnam, 1946.
There’s a pattern that Heyer employs in nearly all her Regency romances for the male and female leads: One is dominant (clever and/or successful, regardless of age) and the other is in need of assistance (and may also be clever and/or impoverished, regardless of age). This time, though, we have the blind leading the blind, two quite charming young people who both are so inept, so thoughtless, so innocent, they ought not to be allowed out alone.
NY: Rizzoli, 2009.
Country Life magazine was founded in 1897 and in every issue since then it has featured, in glorious photographic detail, one or another of England’s rural homes. Moreover, the editors have concentrated not on “greatly stately piles and ducal palaces,” as Miers calls them, but on actual residences still inhabited by actual families — often the descendants of the original folks who built them many centuries ago.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
This is a big book, more than 800 pages, and it’s generally considered one of the most important works in early modern history published in the second half of the 20th century, as well as one of the most striking examples of historical writing of any kind.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
