Troy Chimneys

Margaret Kennedy

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A Regency romance turned on its head: "Tense, touching, human, dire, and funny." --Elizabeth Bowen

First published in 1953, Troy Chimneys masquerades as the private memoirs of Miles Lufton, a minor politician in Regency England. Lufton--wry, worldly, and self-deprecating--recounts the struggle between two selves: the man of feeling and the ruthless social climber. As he maneuvers his way into love and power, the duel between his personalities threatens to undo him.

Kennedy's ingenious construction--an epistolary pastiche of letters, journals, and "found" documents--makes the reader both detective and confidant. The result is a tragicomic confession, a novel of manners with Austenian wit, but one that refuses Austen's consolations. For as Anita Brookner observed, in Kennedy's late style "virtue does not triumph, patience is not rewarded, people do not receive their just deserts."

At once playful and penetrating, satirical and poignant, Troy Chimneys is both a brilliant recreation of Regency style and a modern exploration of ambition, duplicity, and moral compromise.

Book Details

Publisher: McNally Editions
Publish Date: Mar 8th, 2022
Pages: 288
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.43in - 5.04in - 0.79in - 0.95lb
EAN: 9781946022301
Categories: • Literary• Historical - General• Epistolary (Letters, Diaries, etc.)

About the Author

Kennedy, Margaret: - Margaret Kennedy (1896-1967) found popular acclaim before the age of thirty with her 1924 novel The Constant Nymph. It sold copies in the millions and spawned no fewer than three screen adaptations. One of the most successful and prolific British novelists of the twentieth century, she also produced literary criticism, plays, screenplays, and a biography of Jane Austen.

Praise for this book

"Troy Chimneys is a disconcerting novel . . . If [its manner] marries uneasily with the tradition of the English novel as practised halfway through the twentieth century, then it must be allowed that Margaret Kennedy cannot be relied upon to give her readers what they think they have been led to expect. She is disconcerting in her preoccupa- tions, disconcerting in her methods, and technically more learned and experimental than many of her successors."

--Anita Brookner

"It was light-touch satire, and wry and incisive social observation, that formed the common threads that bind Kennedy's novels together . . . [She] combined imagina- tion, observation and a powerful flair for human psychol- ogy to create real, walking, talking individuals whose choices had profound, often disastrous, repercussions that often spread far beyond their social spheres."

--Serena Mackesy

"It is hard not to see Troy Chimneys as something as a rebuttal to the civilized romance of Pride and Prejudice . . . The bite of sadness at the end of this surprising novel leaves a deeper gash than one expects from a book of such impeccable manners . . . Truly original."--Sam Sacks "Wall Street Journal"

"An extremely accomplished re-creation of the period. Its texture has the richness that comes from a structure that is both elaborate and distinct . . . Another contrast in the work is the polished simplicity which indicates such a high degree of technical skill and the imaginative strangeness with which the picture is tinted. The felicities are numerous, now bold like landscape, now subtle as the variations of light." --Elizabeth Jenkins "The Guardian"