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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9809929" data-attributes="member: 78087">Just finished Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp (she also wrote The Rescuers, on which the Disney film is based, a bit like Dodie Smith and 101 Dalmatians, I guess). I picked it up because I liked the 1946 film of the book, the last one made by Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner).The book (written in 1944 and set in 1937) is a gentle mockery of class and prejudices in England. Our eponymous heroine enters service as a parlourmaid with almost none of the usual class consciousness or sense of social expectations - why shouldn’t she have a dog? Why shouldn’t she befriend the local gentry? Why shouldn’t she answer a call on behalf of her plumber uncle and unblock a sink? - to the consternation and amusement of those around her. Cluny is a charming and intelligent protagonist and not at all socialist or revolutionary, she just doesn’t see why she should behave in a certain way just because she’s a servant. It probably seems rather quaint to a modern reader but I can’t imagine many of Sharp’s contemporaries - D L Stevenson or Angela Thirkell or similar - writing anything remotely as transgressive.</blockquote>