Never Too Late

Barsetshire #25

by Angela Thirkell

Whether through inattention or coincidence an imbalance of marriageable young continues. Six Leslie and Graham young men remain unattached, while Edith (disqualified as sister or cousin) continues to enjoy the attentions of three other eligibles.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Historical Fiction, Humor

302 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Angela Margaret Mackail was born on January 30, 1890 at 27 Young Street, Kensington Square, London. Her grandfather was Sir Edward Burne-Jones the pre-Raphaelite painter and partner in the design firm of Morris and Company for whom he designed many stained glass windows - seven of which are in St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean, West Sussex. Her grandmother was Georgiana Macdonald, one of a precocious family which included among others, Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and Rudyard Kipling. Angela's brother, Denis Mackail, was also a prolific and successful novelist. Angela's mother, Margaret Burne-Jones, married John Mackail - an administrator at the Ministry of Education and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Angela married James Campbell McInnes in 1911. James was a professional Baritone and performed at concert halls throughout the UK. In 1912 their first son Graham was born and in 1914 a second son, Colin. A daughter was born in 1917 at the same time her marriage was breaking up. In November 1917 a divorce was granted and Angela and the children went to live with her parents in Pembroke Gardens in London. The child, Mary, died the next year.

Angela then met and married George Lancelot Thirkell in 1918 and in 1920 they traveled on a troop ship to George's hometown in Australia. Their adventures on the "Friedricksruh" are recounted in her Trooper to the Southern Cross published in 1934. In 1921, in Melbourne Australia, her youngest son Lancelot George was born. Angela left Australia in 1929 with 8 year old Lance and never returned. Although living with her parents in London she badly needed to earn a living so she set forth on the difficult road of the professional writer. Her first book, Three Houses, a memoir of her happy childhood was published in 1931 and was an immediate success. The first of her novels set in Trollope's mythical county of Barsetshire was Demon in the House, followed by 28 others, one each year.

Angela also wrote a book of children's stories entitled The Grateful Sparrow using Ludwig Richter's illustrations; a biography of Harriette Wilson, The Fortunes of Harriette; an historical novel, Coronation Summer, an account of the events in London during Queen Victoria's Coronation in 1838; and three semi-autobiographical novels, Ankle Deep and Oh, These Men, These Men and Trooper to the Southern Cross. When Angela died on the 29th of January 1961 she left unfinished the last of her books, Three Score and Ten which was completed by her friend, Caroline LeJeune. Angela is buried in Rottingdean alongside her daughter Mary and her Burne-Jones grandparents.

Reviews

[Eleanor · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual, nothing much happens, but it's an enjoyable enough experience reading about it.

[Mela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have the feeling that the last parts of the series are mostly just "let's remind the previous parts". I like to meet old friends, but it should be balanced with something new to tell, some plot.

This one had a bit more new substance than the previous (Enter Sir Robert), but there were still the same characters and Edith was still struggling with much the same and Mrs Morland was repeating why she started to write books etc. I really love Thirkell's humour (the best parts were the conversations between Peters/butler and a boy) and her style of writing, even so, sometimes I need a bit more to truly enjoy the book.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars for Miss Merriman! I love her small but moving storyline in this novel. So interesting with Lord Crosse and Mrs Morland too. I’m not sure what will become of Edith. I enjoyed the Hallidays storyline too, and I so hope George gets settled into a happily ever after. I’m fond of the characters in these later books in the series. The novels themselves aren’t as sprightly and witty as earlier books in the series but for the committed Thirkell fan, there is a lot to enjoy.

[Teri-K · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Thirkell's books, but this one just wasn't as good as usual. I think as she got older the stories wander and become more diffuse, which makes them less satisfying. Though it's a thin line - these books have always taken lovely side trips, it's part of their charm. Only this was less charming and more frustrating. I also didn't feel the ending worked, as Choyce and Merriman were hardly in the book at all.

This was disappointing enough that I'm taking it off my shelves. I'd rate it 2.5 and on rethinking I'm not rounding it up. Still, it has reminded me how much I enjoy these books at their best, so I'm going back to the beginning and rereading most of the series. I can't wait!

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve just read the last page, and tears are streaming down my face. A moving ending.

As always, for most of the book very little happens. And in that nothing is everything. There is a wistfulness throughout Never Too Late, yet it never feels oppressively autumnal. Just golden.

A gentle balm for long-time Thirkell fans. I suppose it would work as a stand alone, but the rich backstories are especially important in fully appreciating the book.

[Caro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Needed this after a long week. Any Thirkell that includes Mrs. Morland is good.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in Lady Agnes Graham's part of Barsetshire and often at her home of Holdings. The plot seems to center around her youngest daughter Edith and her three swains: George Halliday, John Arthur Crosse, and improbably - her cousin Ludo. However, in this book it is faithful Miss Merriman, not Edith, who finds love and a home of her own at last.
The nursing of old Squire Halliday by Sisters Heath and Ward is a special part of this story for me; Thirkell arranges life - and death - for her characters very kindly, and just as it should be. Lord Stoke is, amazingly, still alive and as deaf and funny as ever. His dear friend, the author Mrs Moreland also figures largely throughout the plot - and there is one, no matter what Thirkell's detractors may say.
The usual hilarious intervals occur below stairs in various kitchens, or in Peters, that is Lord Crosse's butler's, Pantry ("In My Room, cleaning My Silver....").
Some people feel that "nothing" happens in these final books in the series, but I can't agree, even though they are slower paced. If you have come to care about Barsetshire and it's people you won't want to miss out as Thirkell carefully wraps up her loose ends and very kindly "makes a plan" (Lady Graham's own catch phrase) for each person in this long series. I enjoyed Never Too Late much more this time around, than when I read it several years ago. Maybe mid-life has slowed me down enough for it now.

[Elizabeth]

I like Angela Thirkell's prose style very much. And the way things always work out. Such a comfortable world. I get the characters mixed up (there are so many!), but it doesn't really matter.

p. 231 - about Mr. Halliday dying - Dr. Ford says, "He is asleep now. I can't promise anything, but I think he won't be in pain. The works are running down," ... "The works are running down."

New word for me: pleonasm. "... to call a table flat was a pleonasm as no tables were unflat." (p. 236) "the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense (as in the man he said)" - I should be able to work pleonasm into a conversation.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3½ stars. This late entry in Thirkell's Barsetshire series has much of the light humor of the earlier books & a little less of the complaints that life isn't what it used to be. Although the romance in this novel doesn't center on Edith Graham, Lady Graham's youngest (and only unmarried) daughter, she is in it a great deal and has grown out of some her more annoying characteristics of her pre-teen years. I look forward to seeing with whom she will finally fall in love.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cleaning out the shelves, I spotted my vintage copy of this Thirkell and succumbed to its lures (and then also read A Double Affair, the next one in the series). . . . Thirkell is SUCH an acquired taste, but she is truly wonderful when she's at her best. I wish there were movies: the life with butlers and maids is presented as so normal, the mention of leasing out the wing of the big house for a school is so common, and the concern about how to keep the family property intact so frequent that it's hard to realize that these are REALLY RICH PEOPLE! The people in the village who are so gently but snobbishly described as different or as trying hard but not quite making it--they are US! I'd love to see the "actual" landscape that she was describing. It is surely alien to this American, but I do love to visit it.

Plot-wise, not her freshest, as there is a lot of repetition about Edith and her difficulties and George and his. Still, worth a visit.
**Read July 2014.
**Reread March 2016.

[Jocelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of our Barsetshire friends are unmarried. Some of them are in their thirties. Some are in their fifties, or maybe even older! Is it too late for love? Not if the book's title is any indication.

About halfway through, Thirkell gives us a nice reflection on church-going. "To very few of us is it given to be able to empty our minds of mundane thoughts even in the very act of kneeling, which also includes having to rake a hassock towards us with one leg or, if the hassock is one of those miserable, thin squabs which are undignifiedly hung by a ring onto a hook when not in use, to ignore it and, sitting well forward on the extreme edge of the hard seat, bend our body reverently over the back of the pew in front, while wondering if we have half a crown in our bag because a ten-shilling note would look like showing-off and a florin wouldn't be enough, while to put in a half crown made up of smaller silver and base metal coins would feel irreligious."

[Carole Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. I have been working my way through Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire novels over a period of years - only two more to read now. If you like this author's books then you will enjoy this one as it is typical of her style and displays her waspish wit. She is also rather refreshingly non-PC. Her plots are always very slender and as usual nothing much happens in this book but I like the way she writes and she is such a keen observer of human nature. If you have never read any of these books but would like to try one I suggest you start with one of the earlier titles - perhaps 'Wild Strawberries' - because the later books assume the reader will be familiar with all the closely woven county families.

[Cera · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have never read Thirkell's work, DO NOT START HERE! Her later books are really quite, quite bad!

But -- I love spending time with her characters, it's so comfortable and cozy and nothing terrible will ever happen, and so I easily forgive the fact that she can't keep her own plot straight from chapter to chapter. (A fine example: Merry tells Mr. Choyce she's going to Holdings for Christmas, then a few chapters later Lady Agnes has the brainstorm to invite Merry to Holdings for Christmas! I mean, Merry is supposed to be super-awesomely competent and all, but I don't think Thirkell meant for her to be psychic. And this is only one example of many.)

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a return to form, after several volumes of the Barsetshire series in which Thirkell was pretty much phoning it in, in her haste to get everyone married off. The portrait of the Hallidays (especially Mrs. Halliday) dealing with the decline of the Squire is genuinely moving without being overly sentimental. And, Lord Stoke has some of the funniest lines of the entire series at the end of this installment; it's like he wandered in from a Wodehouse novel to cheer everyone up.

[LDuchess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pairing off? Not for Mrs. Morland. What about Merry? And Edith is left hanging, with three interested. Lots of Grahams and Pomfrets.

[Mbuye · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways, 'Never Too Late' might be regarded as a coming of age novel, as the spotlight is turned fiercely on Edith, the last of the Graham girls, who is every bit as spoiled as her sister Clarissa, now Mrs Charles Belton, but kindlier, more observant, and more mature after her 'season' in New York with her Uncle David Leslie and his family, and looks forward to her 'coming out' in the next London Season. All the same, she is sometimes very silly, just a teenager on the cusp of full womanhood.

Nothing actually happens other than a few dinners, a few teas, several church services, a couple of staid weekends at her mother's friends, as most of Edith's own acquaintances are much older than her in age or experience. Since she has inherited her mother's social skills, which are formidable, and her father's common sense, she fortunately is very well liked, unlike Clarissa. Three young men court her, somewhat half-heartedly, for they have common friends from the war years, were actually posted within five miles of each other in France, and are more eager to swap war stories than court a pretty girl. The one very poignant event is the slow decline into senility of the Squire, old Mr Halliday, and his eventual death.

Edith Graham is not the romantic heroine; that dignity is shared by the middle-aged novelist Mrs Morland, with four grown and married sons, and an army of grandchildren; and the rather younger but very private Miss Merriman, who has been a companion-secretary to no less than three demanding elderly ladies since her first appearance.

Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series has one quirk, or difficulty. While it is not necessary or practicable to read Trollope or all of Thirkell's previous novels to follow Thirkell, it helps if one has some kind of backstory to the vast numbers who people her books, most of which are standalone novels; but they are about a particular county, and all the families in it, who are pretty insular.

The major families are themselves descendants of Anthony Trollope's fictitious Barsetshire. One example: the Earl of Pomfret, a retiring but conscientious character who is mentioned in all the Thirkell books, is derived from an obscure and ill-mannered Englishman called Pomfret in a Trollope short story called 'John Bull on the Guadalquivir'. He is a solid, successful merchant, not a peer, not even a knight, but in the intervening hundred years, the family was ennobled by Angela Thirkell to a respectable peerage. And then you have Trollope's Thornes and Greshams and Tozers and Hartletops and Crawleys running through all the Thirkell books, while Gatherum Castle and the Bishop's Palace and Greshamsbury are some of the places in which they live. And their descendants have intermarried. Some take after their Trollopian great-grandparents, especially the Grantly girls who take after Grace Crawley in looks, and others who owe their defiant rebelliousness to Thirkell alone. Although her characters have their inspiration in Trollope, it is plain that Dickens is an equal favourite, going by the references to 'Our Mutual Friend' and ' Bleak House.'

Finally, because Barchester is a cathedral town, the Church, whether it is Church of England (High or Low), or a Catholic chapel, or a Wesleyan mission, is a major player as are the churchmen, from Bishop, Archdeacon, Rector and Vicar to the sexton and verger. So many of Thirkell's books have a charming (and) romantic vicar as the unlikely guy who gets the girl.

This book is not quite standalone. It carries on a courtship started in 'Enter Sir Robert,' the book immediately preceding 'Never Too Late.' Moreover, it has quite come out of Thirkell's post-war blues, her old sense of humour is back at play, and her earlier biting wit has mellowed into sardonic irony. And as Mrs Morland says of her own novels, all her books are exactly the same.

[Mfassler]

I feel anguish for a reader who has not engaged with AT's books in the order in which they were written. If you do, the depth of her thought and the ways in which her writing actually improves over time will not escape you. This book, written late in her career, is an example of a novel that is bursting with delights for the Thirkellian who has been following the history of all the families and their plights as landed gentry. Hard times for this landed class, and one watches them struggle as a whole way of life disappears. Indeed now it is gone. So the books are a cultural history as well as sheer delights, especially in the capturing of conversations and in the exploration of relationships between parents and children. This book is about the Halliday's really, and, as she does so often, Thirkell wrings out many profundities, especially concerning the ways mothers feel about sons and sons feel about mothers. She had a terrible time with her own son, but she rises above that here. George Halliday is a complex figure and one greatly to be admired. And the ways in which the community deals with his father's death is wonderfully explored, as you might know if you grew up in a rural community or a very small town. If you have several Thirkell under your belt, you will be enchanted by this book. If you just it pick up without prior knowledge, I can't imagine it will please you.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This must be one of the last of Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series. Mrs. Morland, Thirkell's alter ego, is a grandmother - even Tony, the talkative and self-assured child from "High Rising" and "The Demon in the House" is now a father of four. It's now 1956 and a whole new generation of young people is growing up and becoming the topic of speculation about marriage. Lady Emily's youngest granddaughter, Edith, is now about 20, and a bit at loose end. She should really have a job, but what? And which of the three young men who are interested in her, Lord Mellings (Ludo from Pomfret Towers), young Mr. Crosse or George Halliday (whose sister Sylvia married Martin Leslie from Rushwater) will get her in the end? As usual, there is not an enormous amount of plot, and much real estate is given over to elucidating the family relationships between the various people who meet for lunch, tea, dinner or county functions. It's hard to imagine that only one year later, in 1957, Jack Kerouac would publish On the Road .

[Joanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now that Sir Robert has entered, I finally got to see him at the very end of this one.
Found Merry Merriman's career running down rather sad. She gave her life to them and then she was a liability. She's sent away for a 'holiday' and they find a replacement for her before she's even gone. Rather like Mrs. Brandon being pushed out of her own home by her selfish son. At least they both found ministers to marry and Merry's has got to be better than Joram. Anybody would be better than the boring Joram.

[Margaret Conmey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book could have been in corporate with Enter Sir Robert to make one book as basically the same story
The only addition is the engagement between two characters of ‘late middle age’ after the briefest of friendships

[AFMasten · Rating 5 out of 5]

The friends and family and neighbors in this book have a gentle way of being truthful with each other.
Mrs. Knox "like occasionally to snub him in a kind way."
Edith's "uncle and aunt laughed, but in a very kind way."

[Carolyn Agosta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like so many of Angela Thirkell's books, this one has little to no plot, other than kind and good and sometimes foolish people trying to figure out their lives and have a little charity towards others. An excellent read in these crazy times we're experiencing now.

[Kelly Hager · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best in this wonderful series; the ending is perfect

[J. Boo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of her better books. A winding road that doesn't really lead anywhere can still be a fun hike, but this one wasn't -- not enough humor. There were some gems amidst the dross, but on the whole, this just barely crosses the line into a 3* rating.

This was the 25th of Thirkell's Barsetshire novels. She was running out of steam, I think.

[Kay Robart · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my review here: https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2023...