Hamish Hamilton edition
Notes from the dust jacket of the 1935 novel “O, These Men, These Men!” by Angela Thirkell.
WHEN Caroline Danvers left her impossible husband and, having nowhere else to go, took refuge with his father and mother, she believed that life held very little more of pleasantness in store for her.
She was wrong, for the Danvers family had nothing in common with her hushand and in time her tragedy was alleviated and she found happiness in another romance.
O, These Men, These Men! is the best novel which Mrs. Thirkell has written – and her many admirers will agree that this is an ambitious claim. In fact, there must be something wrong with the reader who does not agree that the Danverses and their friends make as charming and entertaining a group of people as any he has met.
As the silliest of them would say, they are nearly all ‘simply divine,’ while Mrs. Thirkell’s treatment of their little failings, their inconsequences and their enthusiasns is as assured and amusing as ever.
Moyer Bell edition
O, These Men, These Men!,
The measurement of manners–as devotees of Anthony Trollope are well aware–can offer readers an amusing course in the vanities and verities of the human heart.
Among modern novelists who have taken up the instruments of sophisticated observation, Angela Thirkell stands out as a droll yet sympathetic chronicler of town and country.
Her intuitive grasp of the comedy of social relations among the cultivated gentry of 20th-century Britain, and the elegantly entertaining manner in which she translates her intuitions to the page, has won her a legion of dedicated and well-deserved admirers
O, These Men, These Men!, first published in 1935 and long out of print, is one of Angela Thirkell’s few non-Barsetshire novels.
Believed to be something of a roman-à-clef, it deftly chronicles the sorrows and renewals, the heartbreak and graduation of happiness in the life of a refined young woman who has weathered the end of an ill-starred marriage. Moyer Bell is delighted to return O, These Men, These Men! to print in its continuing series of Angela Thirkell publications.
“There’s just no stopping after one novel.”
– Publishers Weekly
The text on this page is taken from the dust jacket of “O, These Men, These Men!” by Angela Thirkell. The book was published in 1935 by publishers Hamish Hamilton who have since become part of Penguin Random House.
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