The whole book is a small, cumulative but revealing self-portrait. She is always sceptical but never rude, she understands the ridiculousness of the powerful and the pretentious and has that mysterious gift of appearing to be indiscreet when in fact she isn’t. She does what she does seriously — agriculture, horticulture, commerce — but that doesn’t stop her having portraits of pigs in the bathroom or being in love with Elvis. She is a calmly grown-up person, who cries and laughs and fulminates when things are done wrong — the destruction of her local post office at Edensor summons undiluted rage — and she believes in the importance of style, a sense of beauty and grace.
She is a conservative and doesn’t question the social hierarchy into which she was born and married, but that acceptance is allied to the knowledge that the hierarchy has a duty to behave well and be generous. Propriety is important, but a central part of this kind of propriety is laughter, at oneself, at others and fate because laughter, in an odd way, seems to understand more than solemnity. Perhaps in the end this is a book about manners, how to behave, and being funny as a form of civilisation.
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