Angela Thirkell (1890–1961) was a best-selling English-born novelist who wrote numerous novels about English village life in the comedy of manners genre, for which she has been described (along with E F Benson and E M Delafield) as being 'direct heirs of the Jane Austen tradition'. She was especially popular in the 1930s and during WW2, setting many of her books in 'real time' but in the fictional county of Barsetshire, originally created by Anthony Trollope in his clerical and political novels of the mid to late 19th century. 'Cheerfulness Breaks In', subtitled 'A Barsetshire War Survey', is an example of this as it deals with the effects of the first few months of war on those (mostly women) who were keeping the flag flying on the home front. This entertaining novel is a 1st edition, 3rd impression, published in November 1940 (first published September 1940), and provides a time capsule of the age.