In Brief Authority

When Mrs. Stimpson, a pomposity perpetually mistaking herself for royalty, is whisked into playing a queen in a local pageant, she finally gets the status she's always craved. But the joke sharpens when her entire household stumbles into Märchenland, a fairy tale kingdom where their borrowed authority becomes dangerously real. F. Anstey, the comic genius behind Vice Versa, deploys his signature weapon: polite British absurdity. Mrs. Stimpson is a masterpiece of social climbing rendered ridiculous, a woman who has waited her whole life to be importuned by duchesses, and her giddy panic when fantasy and reality blur is pitch-perfect Edwardian farce. The satire cuts both ways, into the middle-class pretensions that crave the pageantry of power, and into the fragile machinery of make-believe that holds it all together. By 1915, Anstey had perfected his art: a comedy that makes you wince with recognition, then laugh anyway. For readers who want their fantasy spiked with social humiliation and their social commentary dusted with magic.