A recommendation by elderberrywine!

Truly, I started speaking like a member of the Bright Young Things x British Landed Gentry in the 1930s after reading this, because there’s something so compelling about the way everyone in these sorts of novels swans around the world. It genuinely is “this absolute disregard for whatever anyone else might think,” and not realizing that the way you grew up and did things is entirely out of the norm. Because you only have your people to compare against, wouldn’t you assume you were the norm?

The entire book is written with the conceit that’s the memoirs/recollection of Fanny, a cousin of the main Radlett family who has seven (!) children despite there being no sentimentality lost between Uncle Matthew Radlett and Aunt Sadie Radlett. While a number of the children wind in and out of the narrative over the years (as both children and adults), we’re most curious to see what will come of Linda, widely regarded as the liveliest and loveliest who, unfortunately, is more captivated by the idea of being in love than working to stay in it. First a foreign (!) banker, then a Communist, then a French duke-slash-lothario, Fanny watches Linda’s life from the sidelines and never treats her as someone to be pitied or mocked, probably because she herself has a certain bit of loving jealousy–after all, as her cousin the eldest Radlett daughter says:

Linda goes off and has this glorious time in Paris, and comes back covered with rich furs, while you and I—what do we get for sticking all our lives to the same dreary old husbands? Three-quarter-length shorn lamb.

And yet she’s saying this, tucked away from the worst of the war in the countryside with a refugee from the Spanish front who happens to be a world class chef and skilled in making preserves and pickles and hunting to supplement everyone’s meagre ration cards. There is no real downfall for the Radletts and their kin, but there’s a real pathos throughout (and quite a bit of tragedy, for all that it sneaks up on you without much fanfare–keep calm and carry on and all that) which keeps you sympathetic instead of ‘eat the rich.’