An orphan at 23, she is self-aware but still green. A pair of suffragettes mildly scandalizes the villagers, but Beatrice is more bedeviled by the politics of her financial dependency. This itself-a woman teacher in 1914-is a breach in tradition that foments small-town intrigue amid petticoats and decorated millinery. The heroine, Beatrice Nash, quickly follows, aboard a train bound for coastal Rye and a job teaching Latin in the village grammar school. Pettigrew fans will cheer to find romance mentioned on the second page and class snobbery on the fourth. This time she deepens the gravitas and fattens the story, which begins on the cusp of World War I. Simonson follows Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (2010), her charming debut, with another comedy of manners nestled in a British village. A bright confection of a book morphs into a story of dignity and backbone.
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