It is the fifth of six novels in the popular Mapp and Lucia series, about idle women in the 1920s and their struggle for social dominance over their small communities.

[1] The town of Tilling was famously inspired by Rye, East Sussex, where E. F. Benson lived, and incidents involving his neighbours sometimes found their way into his comic novels.

In E. F. Benson Remembered, and the World of Tilling, Cynthia and Tony Reavell point out one correspondence involving a Rye resident, writer Radclyffe Hall: "We learn that Radclyffe Hall was greatly excited when she was having extensive alterations done to her house, The Black Boy, in the High Street in 1930, to find a number of ancient objects emerging from the excavations.

"[2] In Frivolity Unbound, Robert F. Kiernan notes that sexual repression is a key theme in the novel, with Lucia and Georgie's marriage dependent on the fact that neither have any appetite for affectionate caresses, and Mapp's pregnancy charade.

"[3] A contemporary review in the Vancouver Sun found the novel insubstantial but charming,[4] while the Sydney Morning Herald wrote, "Mr. Benson has undoubtedly given us no book more charged with 'mirth that after no repenting draws.