Widow Barnaby

Mrs. Barnaby is a widow with opinions about her own importance and precisely zero understanding of how the upper classes actually operate. Armed with relentless self-confidence and an eye for lucrative remarriage, she launches herself into the pitfalls of genteel society with catastrophic results. Her niece Agnes, gentle and quietly observant, watches her aunt's misadventures with a mixture of alarm and affection while navigating her own romantic complications. Frances Milton Trollope, writing with the same incisive eye that made her novels cultural touchstones, skewers the desperate performance of respectability and the absurd economics of marriage in Victorian England. The result is a sparkling comedy of manners where everyone is pretending to be something they're not, and nobody is fooling anyone. Trollope's wit cuts through the social pretense like a blade through silk.