Guests
by Patrick, April 26, 2014 12:15 PM
No one is safe in Stella Gibbon's archly comic gem, as fashionable London fops and wild and wooly country cousins collide and are satirized in equal measure when modern, bright, and charming Flora goes to stay with her farm-dwelling relatives after the death of her parents, and determines to drag the backwards crew into the 20th century. Put Jane Austen's Emma in the guise of one of Waugh's Bright Young Things and send her traipsing blithely into the realm of the Brontes (complete with a madwoman upstairs), and you have some idea of the hijinks that ensue in this send-up of the English pastoral novel, still bracingly hilarious 80-plus years after it was first published.
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