I tried several Cadell novels 20 years ago, since my library at the time had a bunch, and didn't really like them, but since then I've developed a fondness for somewhat twee English countryside romantic comedy. I don't think Cadell is ever going to be one of my favourite authors, but this was a fun, relaxing read about ridicuous people being somewhat silly, and sometimes that's the kind of thing I'm looking for!

Natalie is a woman in her 40s who has no spine (something  that I recall Cadell repeating in all of her books, she seems to think it is the best way for a woman to be), so after her husband dies she lets her life be run by her intelligent, organising, energetic daughter Helen.   Now Natalie has remarried (with Helen's vital help) and her sailor husband is doing One Last Voyage before retiring to settle down with her, so she's going to his ancestral family home of Romescourt to meet her in-laws and new step-children and pick out a family cottage for them to live in when he returns.   Romescourt is, of course, an enormous decaying pile where most of the rooms are closed off (since the family doesn't have the money to employ the number of people it would take to run the house), but neither Lady Rome nor her husband Sir Jason are aggrieved by this; they're too busy gardening and wearing lots of sweaters to keep warm and enjoying the company of their grandchildren.   They welcome Natalie warmly and then take her for granted -- which is exactly what she wants!  Her step-children are much the same;  Lucille is engaged to two different men because she is fond of both of them and can't stand the arguments of making one of them go away, and Jeremy is an artist turned professional sign-painter who has used the money he's earned to buy a fully-staffed farm with attached studio.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around Lucille's two fiancees, and the visit of Natalie's daughter Helen to Romescourt, where she and Jeremy argue constantly.   There's lots of funny dialogue and a fair amount of farce and eventually happy endings for everyone; it is somewhat reminiscent of early Angela Thirkell in tone.  There wasn't a lot of the pretty nature writing I tend to like in books like these, and Cadell makes fun of people who likes clothes instead of delighting in them, but there was enough other stuff in the book that I liked to keep reading it.

So... why only 3.5 stars?  Cadell is inescapably misogynistic; one of the main arcs of the book is

Jeremy getting Helen to quit being a bossy, organising, terrible woman and to be gentle and soft and reliant on A Manne so that he can marry her, which is... uncomfortable at best.  He never does anything actually violent or really mean, but the narrative clearly thinks that he's right, and that Helen giving up her career and London life and sophistication and becoming a sensible countrywoman in tweeds who lets her husband run the show is the happiest possible ending a woman can have.

  Real human beings just *aren't like* Natalie or Lucille, everyone has interiority, people who are scared to assert themselves DO exist and are valid people and do not need to be fixed, but they STILL have actual selves, they are not beautiful clouds that float around for men to admire.

I am going to read more Cadell, because I do like enough of it, but I worry that after 2 or 3 all the soft yielding women are really going to get to me.