A Fair Barbarian

Slowbridge is a town where nothing happens and everyone prefers it that way. Then Octavia Bassett arrives from Nevada, and the certainties of this Proper English village dissolve into delighted scandal. She wears too many diamonds, speaks too directly, and carries gold coins to give to the poor as if poverty were a problem one could solve with generosity. Her aunt Belinda, a pillar of Slowbridge society, finds her niece's American ways both baffling and exhausting. What makes this novel sparkle is Burnett's sharp eye for the absurd pretensions of English gentility. Octavia isn't just a fish out of water; she's a mirror held up to the town's small cruelties and comfortable hypocrisies. Through Octavia's friendship with Lucia Gaston, the repressed granddaughter of Lady Theobald, Burnett explores what happens when genuine warmth collides with a society built on repression and status. Lucia has been trained to be perfectly proper and perfectly miserable. Octavia suggests there might be another way. A delicious comedy of manners, sharp enough to draw blood but warm enough to celebrate the possibility of change. Burnett wrote this at the height of her powers, and the transatlantic satire still bites.