In The Duke's Daughter, ordinary country pleasures provide the happenstance for the hopes and hesitations of young love. Family names familiar from earlier installments in the Baretshire series--Marling and Adams, Winter and Waring, Belton and Dale--populate the pages of this engaging novel, as enamored men and women find their way into each other's hearts, culmination in one day in which three engagements are announced! To traditional concerns of the gentry is added a fierce displeasure with intrusions of the post-war government (the office of "Red Tape and Sealing Wax"), yet this new-found preoccupation does nothing to deter the onset of a happy ending for all concerned.

Few reading pleasures are a comforting as making the acquaintance of an entire community and charting the progress of its generations throught the rituals of romance and the experiments of time. Angela Thirkell's modern Barsetshire chronicals afford just such pleasure, allowing us to follow the local social relations and romantic entanglements of a cohesive band of British gentry through the decades of the mid-twentieth century, when changes in the cultural and political landscape admit confusion to their traditional world, but do little to dim the allure of local comedies.