Novelists Against Social Change

About this book

"Novelists Against Social Change shows how the writing of the best-selling novelists John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell expressed their conservative fears and anxieties by politicizing their fiction and characters, from 1920 to 1960. Buchan's focus on national and European politics of the 1920s and 30s was embedded in his trademark adventure fiction for Establishment heroes. Yates's stylistic exuberance decorated his fierce defence of retrogressive social codes with an almost modernist attention to language. Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire social comedies were an elegy to Victorian values and a passionate defence of upper-class civilization as she conceived it. Resisting the threat of change in social class, political action, the freedom of women, and professionalization produced some of their strongest works. This book pays particular attention to Buchan's novels Huntingtower, Castle Gay and A Prince of the Captivity, to Yates's 'Berry' novels and short stories and his thrillers, and Thirkell's wartime and postwar fiction. "--