Yes, after more than two years of reading a book a month, I finally finished reading all of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels in order. That’s 29 of them! A few brave folks at least kept up with me by reading and or by commenting on one or more of my reviews.
- Brona of Brona’s Books
- Silvia Cachia
- Davida Chazan
- Christine of All the Vintage Ladies
- Liz Dexter of Adventures in Reading
- Penelope Gough
- Gypsi
- Helen of She Reads Novels
- The Readable Word
- Renee
- Anne Roy
- Sue
- Mary Taylor-Lee
- Simon Thomas of Stuck in a Book
- Yvonne of A Darn Good Read
I hope I didn’t forget anyone.
Having finished this project (yay!), I thought I’d wrap up by making a few points about the project in general:
- Was the project worth it? In a way. Before I started it, I had been reading the books arbitrarily, when I came across them, and I think I had read eight or nine of them before. However, attacking them in this way, I would have vague ideas that I had seen characters before but could seldom remember much about them or their relationships with other characters. Reading the books in order helped with this a lot. Some characters who recurred in almost every book became very familiar to me and I could remember others easily. However, I wished I had made a spreadsheet for myself from day one to note relationships and what I knew of each character, it got that complicated, especially toward the end when Thirkell seemed to introduce characters out of the blue and for only one book.
- Were the books written before and during the war really the best ones? That’s the common understanding, but I think they kept up their quality longer than that. In answer to this question, I would say that the last four or five books weren’t quite up there with the rest.
- What is the effect of reading one a month? Reading one a month does have the problem that you get a little tired of Thirkell’s tropes. She has character types that reappear and she has conversations that keep repeating. Also, she does remind you of things that happened to the characters, but towards the end, she brings these things up more than once a book. I think if you were reading one book a year, as you would if you read them as they were released, this wouldn’t bother you as much as if you are reading one a month. In fact, the reminders of what happened to the characters in previous books would be helpful.
- Did the last book being finished by someone else matter? Maybe not. The only difference I could detect were a few conversations, especially at the birthday party, that didn’t seem as clever as usual. Otherwise, I really couldn’t see much difference. However, I have no idea how finished this novel was before Thirkell died. If anything, I would say that there were fewer things repeated in the same book, a problem I had been running into for the last three or four books.
- Were there things I didn’t like about the books? Yes, there were quite a lot of comments that we now consider politically incorrect, especially toward the end of the series. At first, I just put them down to the times, but after a while, they seemed to get worse. There were some racist expressions, despite there being no actual nonwhite characters, and a lot of classist attitudes.
- What is valuable about this series? Even though it is set among privileged characters, it is a chronicle of the changes to society that were caused by the war and its aftermath.
- Who were my favorite characters? Lady Emily, Lucy Marling, Miss Merriman, Wicks, Lord and Lady Pomfret (Gillie and Sally Foster), Lord Stoke, Gradka, whom I at first found irritating, but afterwards made me laugh as soon as she appeared.
Anyway, I’m glad that I finished this project and am glad to be finished with it!