They are not brothers Hugh is a nephew on John’s side of the family and Daniel is identified as Agatha’s deceased sister’s son. Kent invites Beatrice to stay at her home while awaiting her interview.Īlso visiting the Kents that summer are their nephews, Hugh, a medical student, and Daniel, a poet. To hire a woman for this position is a radical departure from tradition.

Her main concern in the summer of 1914 is to get the grammar school’s board of governors to approve Miss Beatrice Nash as the Latin teacher for the fall. Agatha Kent of Rye, a quietly progressive woman involved in many local projects, is certain that her husband, John, and his colleagues in the Foreign Office will be able to smooth matters over. Simonson’s characters, like most people of the era, were vaguely aware of tensions in the Balkans but not of their worst-case consequences. True, the triggering factor was the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Serbia, but the root cause was the imperialist rivalry between Britain and Germany. The Summer Before the War is about the way England sleepwalked into war with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the summer of 1914. In Major Pettigrew, the real story was about overcoming racism. In fact, both have serious themes which elevate them above and beyond pleasant summer reading.

Both novels seem, on the surface, to be comedies of manners set in rural and small town England. Readers who enjoyed Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand will be happy that Helen Simonson has written a second novel, The Summer Before the War.

The summer before the war book