De mortuis nil nisi bonum never seemed to apply to Angela Thirkell (1890–1961). The appearance of a full-length biography—Margot Strickland’s Portrait of a Lady Novelist—sixteen years after Thirkell’s death triggered a kind of orgy of execration among British reviewers in which a single epithet recurred. To Hilary Spurling in The Observer, Thirkell was “a monstrous egotist, snobbish, reactionary, irredeemably callous in private, mistress in public of the sour aside and the spiteful dig.” The Listener’s Patricia Beer praised a related book, the autobiography of Thirkell’s son Graham, for providing “such a brilliant portrait of a monster in a landscape.” “A monster, I decided,” The Spectator’s Francis King recalled of his first meeting with the author of Cheerfulness Breaks In (1940)—part of an oeuvre no fewer than three-dozen strong, a quick headcount reveals—“and no subsequent meeting caused me to modify this initial view of her.” To Claire Tomalin in The Sunday Times, she was “unblessed by either gentleness or charity.”

As serial disparagements go, this is quite a catalogue. To it might be appended the headline that introduced Arthur Marshall’s Sunday Telegraph notice—“Beast in Tweeds.” Clearly, racking up this level of posthumous scorn requires genius of a sort, not to mention staying power, and one of the many revelations of Anne Hall’s new study of Thirkell, A Writer’s Life, is just how early the rebarbativeness set in. Was there ever a more precocious child sent wandering through the drawing-rooms of late-Victorian