Anyone who enjoys British romantic and sentimental dramas set in pre WW I England would like the dramatizations of Catherine Cook novels I've been watching. A friend of mine from Nottingham, the area where the action of her novels takes place, lent me some of her books, which I read and enjoyed. I'm watching "The Moth" now. I thought "The Wingless Bird" was very nice. Her stories are about working class people and the class conflict that ensues when they strive to rise above their station. She always lets them win, too, which I thought was especially nice to see in "The Wingless Bird." Her message is feminist and egalitarian, a nice antidote to Downton Abbey, which is ever so intent on selling us on a putrid class system.
For a somewhat more high-toned take on that period in English life, I recommend Virginia Woolf's *The Voyage Out,* my favorite novel by her, and L.P. Hartley's *The Go-Between.* In retrospect, we regard this as an era of innocence, but it was not really that. What it was was different.
As Hartley said, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
I often think of my mother's young girlhood in provincial Santa Barbara, California, and how the way it was then is not accessible to us now. It was a very sentimental time, but the sentimentality was shot through with tragedy. People had strong unmediated feelings and suffered from them. They were very passionate. They died of grief. We aren't like that today. We have TV and therapy and pills and a million diversions, as they didn't.