Angela Thirkell (1890–1961) was a British author whose ability to produce one book a year, every year, and set in that year blurred the lines between novelist and social historian. Like so many of the writers that she admired—Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot—Thirkell shared their X-ray vision: an unmatched ability to assess the hypocrisies, desires, and prejudices of her characters and, better still, play them for laughs. Her biggest literary project, the Barsetshire Chronicles, consists of twenty-nine novels, each acting as another slice of English country life; a utopian vision of bucolic countryside, grand manors, and village fêtes.