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Anglophiles Anonymous
569 books / 82 members / 8928 posts
Please note: This is a private group, mainly to keep out lurkers and tittlebats. If you’d like to join, please do not email the group administrator. Instead, do leave your card with Mrs. Danvers, along with a note on her page, explaining why you’d like to gambol amongst us and what you’d bring to the conversation in terms of your obsession with all literary things Angl-ish.
Much Prized: The ability to write a coherent sentence, a sense of humour, an appetite for stimulating intercourse and a deep and abiding love of British literature. The possession of a ridiculous British alias is much admired.
Much Frowned Upon: Lurking.
A Message from The Most Hon. The Marquess of Manleigh:
“I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.” -- Posted at the entrance of Renishaw Hall, home of Sir George Reresby Sitwell
Dear Besotted Reader of British Literature,
Allow me to introduce you to our little circle, an oasis for those of you out there who suspect you’ve been born in the wrong country. You pale, lost souls who wish you could pepper your prose with spellings like “civilised” and “sense of humour” without eliciting raised eyebrows. You who stare at the clock wistfully at 3 pm and bemoan the fact that no steaming pot of tea and scrummy comestibles are nigh. You know who you are. You find yourself spending inordinate amounts of time reading Brontë, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Woolf, Waugh, Mitford, Wodehouse and basically any other writer with a British accent. You curse fate because you weren’t a member of the Bloomsbury group. To your chagrin, you’ve never found a body in your library. You long to find others of your ilk, soul-mates with whom you can prattle on about British literature, poetry, cinema and telly without receiving blank stares in return. My dears, you are not alone.
Step into the drawing room and tell us all about it. Would you like one lump, or two?
Yours cordially,
Terence ("Tinky") Egbert Ethelred Edward George Kitty Carlisle
1st Marquess of Manleigh, 14th Viscount Manleigh, KQHB (Knight of the Queen's Handbag)
Manleigh Hall, Studleigh-Under-Dureth, Sussex
Current Group Read:
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Our Group Reads (To Date)
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
Atonement by Ian McEwan
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
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