Angela Thirkell's World: A Complete Guide to the People and Places of Baretshire

by Barbara Burrell

Barsetshire has been the subject of two series. First, Anthony Trollope developed the sequence novels with the first Barsetshire in the mid-nineteenth century. Angela Thirkell, in her twenty-nine novels set in the twentieth century Barsetshire, has perfected the form. Barsetshire is an imaginary west country county populated with people, towns, villages, estates and all the things necessary to create a rural society not so far from London in custom or protocol. � This book is a reference work designed to help readers find their way through the thicket of Angela Thirkell's creations. Since she began populating her mythical Barsetshire in the early 1930's and then wrote one a book a year, it is no wonder that even the author occasionally lost track of what she had done with a few a them!

Genres: Reference, Fiction

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a labor of love! This exhaustive compendium of every Angela Thirkell character is especially handy as one gets further along in the Barsetshire series. It’s wonderful to have a reference when confused between a Dean and a Leslie, or when trying to place a character who reappears from a previous book.

If you want to avoid spoilers, just be aware that female characters may appear under their married names, e.g., young Jane Smith may also appear under her later wedded name of Jane Smith Jones. I got quite the surprise seeing a character listed under the As as married to the MOST unlikely person! And I haven’t yet reached the book where it happens.

But with that caveat (which is really down to the reader, not the author), this is a handy and lovingly compiled reference work.