All of Sylvia Towsend Warner's novels are superb, but this and another of her historical novels, THE CORNER THAT HELD THEM, are her two true masterpeices, which means they are among the best books in English written in the twentieth century. This work concerns a very proper family of a wealthy East Anglia merchant living in the town of Loseby on the British coast during the early nineteenth century through the mid-Victorian period. John Barnard greatly loves his wife and many children, but his innocent insistence upon rectitude and controlling his children (and choosing favorites among them) creates great unhappiness and ruins most of his children's lives. The genius of the story lies not only in Townsend Warner's extremely enchanting wordplay but also in her absolute command of narrative voice: the narrative focalizes from one character to another with utter deftness, and you see fully the characters' abilities to make each other miserable by not saying what they truly feel. The book is very moving, but it is also (as with all of Townsend Warner's novels) exceptionally funny; like all of Townsend Warner's historical fiction, it suggests that history for individuals may be experienced very differently on their own level than from the perspective of a genuine later historian.