As We Are: A Modern Review by E.F. Benson

Paperback. 1986. 

A comic elegy on the devastastating — and liberating — effects of the First World War. Lord and Lady Buryan are vintage Benson characters of the stately traditional school; comfortably esconced in their hideous family seat, separated from the coming generation by the yawning chasm of 1914-18. Entrenched in their armchairs, they can come to terms with the war raging on the Continent, but what are they to make of girls who smoke, of ungrateful villagers and shrinking incomes, let alone a daughter-in-law who absconds to Venice with a dubious princess?