Not sure why, since I did somewhat enjoy a Thirkell book in the past, but I found this unreadable. ( )

This is an interesting little misfire of a book. Angela Thirkell tries to marry a slightly farcical comedy of errors with some acid observations about human nature and folly and just a dash of melodrama. Ankle Deep may have read differently in the Thirties, with the characters' behaviour coming across as less mannered and unlikely than it does to the modern reader. I did find myself wanting to shake and/or snap at many of the characters, who are fairly uniformly unlikeable. The book's saving grace, which won me over as I read, was Thirkell's awareness that the characters she's created are mostly silly, shallow people and some of the observations she makes about them are throwaway but razor sharp—even if she is ultimately unwilling or unable to push those observations beyond characterisation into something deeper. ( )

In her biography Angela Thirkell Portrait of a Lady Novelist, Margot Strickland suggests Ankle Deep is very autobiographical. She claims Angela fell in love in 1929 with a man who was never named. Their relationship is reflected in Ankle Deep, with Angela as Aurea.
This is such an intriguing angle on the novel. Aurea as Angela seems to me to be very strange. She is described constantly as 'not grown up" by those who know her best, her parents, and the lover. She is extremely emotional, in a flutter about her passion and her principles for much of the novel. Her situation is presented in the usual Thirkell way, as a lighthearted, clever funny social display . From what we know of Angela, in her writings, she must have been very perceptive and hardheaded about just this society she was involved in.
It's a fascinating look at her work, as her first novel before the famous Barsetshire series got underway. ( )

The opening paragraphs of Ankle Deep suggest that it is a typical example of a particular genre. The author lets the reader continue under that misapprehension for a short while then inexorably bends the story in one place and straightens it in another and discloses a few cards hidden up the narrator’s sleeve. By the last page the reader has been taken to both expected and unexpected places and has been finally set down not far from the point where they were originally swept up – in the process having experienced a ride on that strangest of beasts, the existential comedy of manners.

This early Thirkell novel, published in the same year as her first Barsetshire novel, is written with a surety of authorial voice that allows the reader for relax and enjoy this glimpse of a way of life that zie knows will only too soon come to an end. The particular problems that face the characters are both similar to and very different from those which face families today. While some of the particular problems Thirkell's characters encounter (for example, the public shame that accompanied divorce) reflect a much different world than our own other problems (especially those rooted in the personalities of the characters) remain with us today.

Although this is not one of the better remembered Thirkells it was an enjoyable read, a worthwhile reread and a spur to find and read more of the author's work. ( )

In this, one of her early 'apprenticeship' novels, pre-Barsetshire, one can feel Thirkell still in search of the right distance and attitude that will suit her style of observation and emotional comfort zone. Ankle Deep is at once more serious and more frivolous in feeling, than the later more polished and confident novels perhaps because even while the writing itself is solid and the observations as always needle sharp, the characters talk too much and more like the snap-snap thirties clever-clever of the classic witty thirties play than a novel and the focus is intensely on one person, Aurea Turner who, unhappily married, is in London for a month (from Canada) visiting her parents when she falls in love with a man-about-town aptly named Valentine. He is a cut-out, really, who he is beyond a personable and well-meaning gent, hardly matters, as Thirkell makes it clear that it is Aurea's imagination that rules her life, and not necessarily in a good way - as among other things, she is terrified of physical touch, which, in itself is an unusually dark and complex problem to be addressed, however cautiously, in a Thirkell novel.

To the Thirkell devotee, Ankle Deep is a revealing book -- about choices Thirkell made -- NOT -- to tangle with harder deeper subjects. The combination of Aurea's darker problems and the Thirkellian tartness is not entirely comfortable. But as always I marked page after page: "Everything was silent with that loud quietness so disconcerting to a town-dweller" or '.... the more you try to explain to people what you really are, the denser grows the mist around you....." or my favorite, "Nothing lovelier than an earthly spring could ever be, and it was most annoying that one's eyes couldn't look with enough concentration to make it one's own forever." ***1/2 but fascinating to the right audience. ( )