To republish this 1924 novel as a Virago Modern Classic is surely going too high, but then it has lasted the course after a fashion and apart from being turned into a successful play (starring Noel Coward), it has also been filmed several times. Margaret Kennedy caught just the taste of the time, mixing a stolid domestic Englishness with "Continental" bohemians a musical family, a mistress, a man in love with two women at the one time, a young, enamored girl dying in the final pages, etc. The result has little to do with literature per se, but apparently it survives inside its own middle brow canon, and at the very least it is a better and more readable book than Mary Webb's equally celebrated Precious Bane. Another period piece from the same publisher is Pirates at Play by Violet Trefusis (£6.99 in UK).