While a fan of Crompton's William books this is the second of her adult novels I've tried and just not got on with.

I've enjoyed several of Richmal Crompton's previous books (the Just William series, of course, and also one of her adult novels). There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Richmal Crompton is best known for her Just William series for children, but she also was a prodigious (and now largely neglected) writer of fiction for adults in the fist half of the twentieth century. Caroline Cunliffe is in her mid thirties, unmarried and an efficient and tireless organiser of her family, with its rather complicated history. It soon becomes apparent that Caroline is a controlling, suffocating and domineering woman, who doesn't accept her charges’ independence and causes upset and resentment. She sails on serenely assured of her own rectitude and correctness to meddle in the affairs of others. Caroline sincerely believes she is selfless and acting for everyone’s benefit, but the reality is much more different. But when she invites her mother, Philippa, who she has not seen for 30 years after her mother fled from an unhappy marriage – then things turn bad for the unspeakably priggish Caroline.
The writing is gentle and assured and reminds me much of the society novels of EF Benson, in their forensic inspection of middle-class English morality.