Summer Visits — Margery Sharp

Summer Visits is the fictional chronicle of a house and a family, a story of changing social and human relationships that only Margery Sharp at the top of her form could write - entertainment at once colorful, bustling, and suggestive of the popular BBC-produced sagas broadcast on PBS television. Cotton Hall, half rectory and half manor, was brought in the 1850s by old John Henry Braithwaite and named for the commodity that had brought him his fortune in Lancashire. There Braithwaite settled and saw his daughter marry into the stacey family and his sons go off to enter law. Every Summer was marked by visits by the Braithwaites and Staceys and their children - visits preceded, and followed, by shrewdly observed, delightfully portrayed manners and misbehavior: disturbing alliances, behind-the-hedge seductions, eccentricities, romantic dreams, and disappointments. These traditional summer visits, over a century, are succeeded by others of a different, dramatic kind as Cotton Hall becimes in turn a retreat for Anglican gentlewomen, a convalescent home for the wounded Tommies of the Great War, and a refuge for evacuees from the Blitz. (From the dust cover)