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...more »

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, 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.

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?

Cordially yours,

Terence ("Tinky") Egbert Ethelred Edward George Kitty Carlisle
1st Marquess of Manleigh, KQHB
Manleigh Hall, Studleigh-Under-Dureth, Sussex

Current Group Read:

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

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


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