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I read Humble's book when writing my thesis on the topic as an undergraduate, and got rather peeved because she'd said all sorts of things I was hoping were original to me - but don't hold that against her. She writes about all sorts of authors close to the Stuck-in-a-Book heart: EF Benson, Elizabeth Bowen, Agatha Christie, Ivy Compton-Burnett, EM Delafield, Monica Dickens, Rachel Ferguson, Stella Gibbons, Rosamund Lehmann, Rose Macaulay, Nancy Mitford, Dodie Smith, Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Thirkell, Virginia Woolf. What a list. Even if you
The chapter headings are:
1. 'Books Do Furnish A Room': Readers and Reading
2. 'Not Our Sort': The Re-Formation of Middle-Class Identities
3. Imagining the Home
4. The Eccentric Family
5. A Crisis of Gender?
All such fascinating topics - and Humble writes with a style and verve which makes everything completely accessible without 'dumbing down'. All rather middlebrow, now I come to think of it. EM Delafield would be proud to be included, and I can think of no higher, nor more apposite, praise than that.
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