The genre is named for the AGA cooker, a type of stored-heat oven that came to be popular in medium to large country houses in the UK after its introduction in 1929.
[5] In setting, according to an earlier article in that paper, it offers a "gingham-checked world" associated with "thatched English villages" and "ladies in floral dresses".
[6] Guardian book critic Laura Wilson described an Aga saga setting as "complete with sprawling, untidy farmhouse (flagstones, dogs, Wellington boots, and much nursing of mugs of coffee)".
[8] According to a critical analysis in The Independent, the genre rose to prominence in the 1990s not as a continuance of the celebration of "sex and shopping [that] reflected the materialism of the 1980s", but as a signal of "disillusionment with those values".
[9] Guardian Arts and Heritage correspondent Maev Kennedy described the genre poetically as encapsulating "the nostalgic yearning for an Arcadian idyll".