August Folly cover art

August Folly

A Virago Modern Classic

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

August Folly

By: Angela Thirkell
Narrated by: Jilly Bond
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

It's August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home. But the numerous and impossibly glamorous Dean family - exquisite Rachel, her capable husband and six of their nine brilliant children - have come for the holidays, and their hostess, Mrs. Palmer, plans to rope everyone into performing in her disastrous annual play.

Surrounded by the irrepressible Deans, Richard and his sister, Margaret, cannot help but have their minds broadened, spirits raised and hearts smitten.

©2016 Angela Thirkell (P)2016 Hachette Audio UK Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

 High Rising cover art
The Lark Shall Sing cover art
Miss Buncle's Book cover art
The Frenchman and the Lady cover art
Anna and Her Daughters cover art
Barbara Pym: A BBC Radio Drama Collection cover art
The Young Clementina cover art
Death of an Author cover art
Mrs. Tim of the Regiment cover art
The Stratton Story cover art
The Fair Miss Fortune cover art
The Musgraves cover art
Sarah Morris Remembers cover art
Chatterton Square cover art
Language of the Heart cover art
The Complete Mapp and Lucia, Volume 1 cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
This is my favourite Angela Thirkell novel and Jilly Bond provides an excellent narration (I think my only quibble would be Mr Tebben's accent, which I see no reason for). It's a complete froth of a story - with everyone home for the summer and eating all the raspberries, Mrs Palmer decides that it's the perfect moment to stage a Greek drama in the family's concerted barn, and commandeers all the young people and half the village residents. Against this background people discover real and imagined loves, and Gunnar the cat behaves badly whenever he can. Delicious.

Delicious

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I love how subtle Angela Thirkell has been with her comments on gender inequality here. For example Mrs Thirrell is obviously the brains of the family with all her published textbooks, but is still expected to be a good housekeeper. Don’t be put off by this though, it isn’t at all aggressive feminist commentary. Much like Jane Austen it is first and foremost a great story with engaging characters. I‘M going to listen to more!

Subtle and fun

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This, one of Angela Thirkell's earlier and sharper novels, is very funny. She manages her large cast of characters (brilliantly realised by narrator Jilly Bond) with skill. Its a book very much of its time - the sort borrowed by my mother from Boots lending library once a week - but contains some very clever portrays of women and men contrained by the conventions of the age. The Tebbens, struggling bravely on a low income, are inadvertently entertaining and a delight. Thirkell was a snob - and her books grew increasingly snobbish and tiresomely full of details about the background of her imaginary Barsetshire (based on Trollop's County of the same name) as she grew older, but her in her earlier books this problem is not in evidence. She does describe the dilemmas and constrains facing clever women so well that laughing at them becomes a guilty pleasure.

Whenever I find myself trying to do something with leftover food I think of Mrs Tebben and her "little bits of .... this or that 'that we all like SO much' " I remember very well the salads of tough, wet, gritty lettuce leaves, the uneatable rock cakes and the badly cooked haddock of my schooldays in the 50s.

My mother sat next to Thirkell's son, Colin MacInnes, at a dinner once. His first words to her were "I hope you don't plan to ask me questions about my horrible mother." which left my mother at a loss for the remainder of a very uncomfortable evening. I fear that MacInnes started life as the endearing Tony Morland of High Rising, became the older, cleverer, more amusing Morland of Summer Half but became the angry misunderstood Richard Tebben of August Folly. MacInnes's books tell the true last part of this tale.

A complex rural romance set in the early 1950s

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.