Laugh-out-loud funny at times; very insular, and knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian history and politics is required to get some of the inside jokes Gibbons maps on to very caricature-esque characters. Some of the chapters dragged on and I felt this would have worked better as a short story or novella. The implicit analysis of class relations was done well, and I liked how Gibbons shows her debt to literary predecessors like Austen and Dickens while still firmly rooted in 1930s England.