Sebastian stood beside his mother holding the red leather pad, with slits into which cards bearing the names of the guests were inserted. As she stood holding it, he watched his mother's reflection in the mirror. With her fair hair and lively little crumpled face, she looked extraordinarily young for her age as a rule, but now she was busily applying cream and wiping the cosmetics from her face with a handkerchief, at the same time as Button [her servant] removed the pads from under her hair and laid them on the dressing-table. 'Rats,' her children called them. They were unappetising objects, like last year's bird-nests, hot and stuffy to the head, but they could not be dispensed with, since they provided the foundation on which the innumerable hairpins were to be stuck. It was always a source of great preoccupation with the ladies that no bit of the pad should show through the natural hair. Often they put up a tentative hand to feel, even if in the midst of the most absorbing conversation; and then their faces wore the expression which is seen only on the faces of women whose fingers investigate the back of their heads.
Excerpts like the above are really the only thing I could think to recommend reading Sackville-West's The Edwardians about. The book has not much in the way of plot -- almost exactly halfway through, I felt a glimmer of hope as things started happening and it looked like the story was going to pick up. But then, just like when I had a similar moment watching the movie The Corpse Bride, my hopes were dashed as things just reset and the event pretty much led nowhere. In Corpse Bride the movie lagged because the main character had nothing at stake, and was going to be about equally happy no matter which direction things fell. In The Edwardians it's kind of the same trouble, though more probably he'd be similarly unhappy no matter what.
Now, there is this modern preoccupation with "spoilers" and I have had people bitch me out for "spoiling" something that happens less than 10 pages into a book and which was summarized on the back cover to draw readers... so, for the sake of these obsessives, I'm going to warn:
POSSIBLE SPOILERS OF A PLOTLESS BOOK.
The main character is Sebastian, a young Duke who comes 'of age' in the course of things. The focus is basically on his love life, though none of his relationships really go anywhere or seem to substantially change him. His first romance is with an older woman, and the point of the book where things seemed to 'pick up' was where her husband found out and forced them to call it off. Except they really did just that -- no real fighting to hang on or anything -- and so Sebastian moves on to the next, a sort of crush that fails. Then two more relationships that also went nowhere important are briefly summarized, then the coronation of King George happens, and then Sebastian agrees to leave on an adventure with a character who was supposed to be really important because his name popped up randomly throughout the book, but we never actually get to hear anything about the said adventure so -- I can only conclude -- it must have been more boring than what we did get subjected to in the book.
I don't hate this book at a "I'll never get those moments of my life back" level but, I'm glad I just got it at the library instead of buying it or something. The author had moments of sarcasm or wit but not enough to really justify this experiment. The main character isn't really interesting enough for what he's thinking to be all that gripping, and he doesn't do much of anything. Meanwhile his sister, Viola, actually seems to have a somewhat more interesting adventure going on in the course of things, yet she is barely mentioned. Or even the adventurer Anquetil is doing more interesting stuff (though in that case I can forgive it, almost, since I think it was maybe the point that Sebastian missed his chance to have adventures with Anquetil -- but still, it's kind of like, who wants to read about the boring life he had instead?)
It's also of note that this book was written in the 1930s, so the accounts of Edwardian life are maybe as-observed by the authoress in her youth, but not exactly reliable for being as lived (she'd have been about 7 years old at the time that the majority of the tale takes place.) Those observations are nevertheless the part I found most interesting about the piece -- descriptions of dressing, of what the servants did, etc.
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