Greenery Street
Denis Mackail2002

PG Wodehouse described this 1925 novel as 'so good that it makes one feel that it's the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.' Greenery Street can be read on two levels - it is a touching description of a young couple's first year together in London, but it is also a homage - something rare in fiction - to happy married life. Ian and Felicity Foster are shown as they arrive at 23 Greenery Street, an undisguised and still unchanged Walpole Street in Chelsea. Their uneventful but always interesting everyday life is the main subject of a novel that evokes the charmingly contented and timeless while managing to be both funny and profound about human relations. DenisDenis Mackail was a grandson of Edward Burne-Jones on his mother's side and son of JW Mackail, the eminent classical scholar; his sister was the novelist Angela Thirkell. He wrote nearly a book a year for thirty years.