A Month in Literary Britain

O nly a month? Who am I kidding? I spend exorbitant amounts of (literary) time in England, with occasional forays into Scotland, Ireland, and even Wales. An actual trip to these storied places may be in my future, but for now, I explore towns, lochs, and bogs through the pages of books. December 2025 saw me through five novels set somewhere in the lands of the Bard and the faeries: Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, but penned by Shakespeare; The Book of Dragons comes from the imaginative English socialist E. Nesbit; and Cold Comfort Farm, An Unsuitable Attachment, and Miss Buncle’s Book all take place in the English countryside (or the outskirts of London). My attention was primarily captured by these last three books, all published in the 20th century, all by female British authors, and all wonderfully amusing.

Why I thought Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm was an Advent book I’m still unsure, but such was my initial impression when I reserved it at the library. It is decidedly not an Advent novel in even the remotest way and is instead set in the late winter, spring, and summer of, supposedly, 1946. The publication date is 1932, but for some reason, Gibbons set her book in the nearish future. This is a uniformly strange book, both terribly odd and dreadfully niche. It is straight-up satire, its whole goal being to lampoon the English rural novel genre popular in Gibbons’s day, and it accomplishes this handily. While it’s not a well-known book today, some people may recognize the title from a 1995 movie of the same name, staring Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellan, Steven Fry, and other notables. I was pleased to discover that Rupert Penry-Jones (Captain Wentworth in my preferred version of Persuasion) also played a role in this film. This isn’t an easily described book — one can only read it and hope for the best. But if you’re in the right mood — and have already imbibed large quantities of English authors in the course of your life — this might be your next right read. To get you in said mood, here’s a quote that still has me giggling (this is a thought of the main character, Flora Poste, after she meets someone she dislikes, and that person quotes one of her favorite authors to her):

One of the disadvantages of an almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing-gown.

British satire now having completely gone to my head, I leapt into the world of sadly underrated but intriguing author Barbara Pym. National Review magazine’s stalwart managing editor Jessica Hornik introduced me to Pym a few years ago, and while I enjoy her novels now, they do take some getting used to. This is especially true if you are an Austen devotee and appreciate your witty social commentary to be served alongside decent men and fairly happy endings. Pym does indeed provide social commentary, but hers is more barbed than Austen’s. Her characters are a rather sad lot, and the novels seem to have a postwar shade of beige or brown cast over them, capturing a not-quite-forgotten element of 1950s and 1960s Britain. The author uses this drab background to highlight the women everyone takes for granted and to scold the men who forget them. Published in 1982, An Unsuitable Attachment is my third Pym novel, and while I prefer Excellent Women, this one does have a slightly more cheerful ending for the heroine than some of her other works. Where Cold Comfort Farm is blatantly cutting, An Unsuitable Attachment is more subtle. Pym doesn’t spring sudden scandals or shocking news on her readers. You can see, with painful clarity, the follies and foibles of her characters, without much cloak of dignity from the author. It’s not exactly dark humor (for that, see Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, another recent read of mine), but it has a quality of overblown-but-almost-real commentary that makes you smirk . . . and then think.

Over Christmas break, I rounded out my humorous trilogy with a dip into D. E. Stevenson’s 1934 tale Miss Buncle’s Book. This was a Substack recommendation, and a thoroughly delightful one at that. Mousy, frumpy, unpretentious Barbara Buncle finds herself in need of money, so she does what all such needy people do: She writes a book. Guileless and honest, Miss Buncle finds she can write only about what she knows, and what she knows very well is her tiny town of Silverstream. Into her book it went, under a different name of course, along with all the townspeople and their idiosyncrasies. Miss Buncle wasn’t trying to make a stir or mock anyone — she simply wrote what she saw . . . and added a little twist in the book’s second half. To her surprise, the novel becomes an instant sensation around the country and a source of consternation in her little village, where no one suspected the mild Miss Buncle to be behind it all. Kidnappings, mistaken identities, multiple weddings — this book sounds like a thriller, but it is nothing of the sort. Just another day in Miss Buncle’s world where joy comes for the quiet ones.

Cold January days call for some source of light and levity, so let yours be found in the fresh air and sprightly tales of Stella Gibbons, Barbara Pym, and D. E. Stevenson.