Please read this note in its entirety: This is a private group, mainly to keep out tittlebats. We are a very active, enthusiastic group devoted to reading together, discussing together, and amusing each other. If you’d like to join, please do
not send a message to the "Group Administrator". Instead, use the Shelfari "Search Members" function to seek out my housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Leave your card and a letter of introduction with her, explaining why you wish 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: Participation in our Group Reads, the ability to write a coherent sentence, a sense of humour, a sense of play, a good imagination, good manners, an appetite for stimulating intercourse and a deep and abiding love for British literature, arts and culture. The possession of a ridiculous British alias is much admired.
Much Frowned Upon: Lurking. All those found guilty of Lurking will be expunged once a year using the most shocking medieval methods. Also, Shirking. If one doesn't participate in our Group Reads, one wonders what one is doing here. Also, Irking: discussion of one's existence in that thing called the Real World. The details are invariably dreary and we are not Facebook.
A Message from The Most Honourable 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 half-past four 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 the Brontës, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Woolf, Waugh, Mitford, Wodehouse and any other writer with a British accent you contrive to lay your hands upon. 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,
M.A Word About Manleigh HallManleigh Hall, which sits on 10,000 unspoiled acres in East Anglophilia, is the country seat of Terence Carlisle, 1st Marquess of Manleigh, and has been home to the Carlisle family for over two hundred years. Commissioned in 1791 by Ethelred Carlisle, 10th Viscount Manleigh, and designed by Sir Pericles Gobsmack, it is built in the so-called Gothibethan style and is considered one of the most vulgar English houses in existence. The parkland, designed by the infamous “Incompetency” Brown, contains a primate zoo, a maze, a prison tower, a Gothic chapel (built in 1962), a divinity school (Studleigh Seminary), a private psychiatric hospital (Saint Indigestia's Lunatic Asylum), and a flock of the most blood-thirsty swans in Great Britain. The house oozes fine art, fine books, fine furniture, fine food, youthful clergy and the occasional tittlebat. The house is open to the public on Thursdays from 10:30 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. Visitors to the Hall should not miss a trip to the nearby village of Manleigh-Under-Dureth, which boasts a particularly insignificant Norman-era church, Saint Indigestia's, and an Elizabethan inn, The Cock and Tittlebat, where uncomfortable room and unappetising board may be found at exhorbitant prices.
Upcoming Group Reads:The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge (Discussion Begins 1 April)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Discussion Begins 1 May)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Discussion Begins 1 June)
Current Group Reads:Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Discussion Begins 1 March)
The Toys of Peace by Saki (Continuing Saki of the Week feature)
A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman (Ongoing Poem of the Week feature)
Our Group Reads (To Date)2008The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
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
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Our Favourite Group Read, 2008)
2009Villette by Charlotte Brontë (Our Favourite Group Read, 2009)
Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
Mapp and Lucia by E. F. Benson
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (A nod to the Commonwealth)
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits by Lewis Carroll
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night, Or What You Will by William Shakespeare
Reginald by Saki
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym
Reginald in Russia by Saki
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie
2010Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Private Lives by Noël Coward
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie
Love's Impudence by Dido Courtland
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (Our Favourite Group Read, 2010)
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki
The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
The History Boys by Alan Bennett
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward
The Monk: A Romance by Matthew Lewis
Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
2011The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (tie; Our Favourite Group Read, 2011)
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (tie; Our Favourite Group Read, 2011)
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray
Picadilly Jim by P. G. Wodehouse
2012The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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