Books: Perfectly Beastly Snobs

THE HEADMISTRESS — Angela Thirkell —Knopf ($2.50).

Since 1936 talented Angela Thirkeil, who is. as stylistically languid as her Pre-Raphaelite grandfather Edward Burne-Jones and as staunchly British as her cousins Stanley Baldwin and the late Rudyard Kipling, has made hay in the fictitious fields of Barsetshire — the mythical English region created by Victorian Novel ist Anthony Trollope. In a series of novels (including the best-selling The Brandons and Northbridge Rectory}, Author Thirkell has peopled Barsetshire with 20th-Century "descendants" of Trollope's squires, rural deans, bluebloods, housemaids and self-made men — all...