[4] Angela was tall, "with legs like columns, and large, masculine feet" and she ruled over her younger cousins and siblings, who called her AKB—Angela Knows Best.

So, in November 1929, Angela left her husband without warning, returning to England with Lancelot George, on the pretext of a holiday, but in fact quitting Australia for good.

[15] Lacking money, she begged the fare to London from her godfather, J. M. Barrie, and used the sum intended for her return ticket for two single passages, for herself and her youngest son.

An alert reader of contemporary fiction, Thirkell also borrowed freely from little known titles like John Galsworthy's The Country House, from which, for example, she lifted the name 'Worsted' which she used for the village setting of her novel August Folly (1936).

She was upset that her circle of well educated and upper-middle-class friends thought her novels "too popular"[22] knowing they preferred, as she did, such writers as Gibbon, Austen, Dickens and Proust.

Three Houses (1931, Oxford University Press; repeatedly reprinted) is a short childhood memoir which simultaneously displays Thirkell's precociously finished style, her lifelong melancholy, and her idolisation of her grandfather, Edward Burne-Jones.

Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934; republished in 1939 as What Happened on the Boat) "is concerned with the experiences of a number of English and Australian passengers aboard a troop-ship, the Rudolstadt, on their way back to Australia immediately after World War I.

These books include Marling Hall, Growing Up and The Headmistress and provide a vibrant picture of the attitude, struggle and resigned good cheer, of British women during the war.

A review of Private Enterprise (1947) wrote: "In Barchester all is not well/The County People pine and sigh/They wish the government in Hell/And long for happier days gone by/When gloom did not obscure the sky.

Among these, The Old Bank House in particular shows Thirkell concerned with the rise of the merchant class, her prejudices evident but giving way to grudging respect for industriousness and goodhearted generosity.

In reviewing Summer Half, the humor magazine Punch (magazine) called her "one of the great humorous writers of our time"[30] and Norman Collins wrote of Wild Strawberries that "A hundred one times the reader is rewarded by the radiance of that inner grin which comes from sharing some entirely malicious piece of social observation that any man, and most women, would have missed completely.