Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (1935)

Being able to read this book is a treat. It had been banned by the family since its first publication. Nancy's sisters Unity and Diana were furious with her for her plowing of their fascist beliefs in the form of the Union Jackshirts in this novel. In fact, almost everyone gets similar treatment in these pages, excepting perhaps those few who most closely resemble Nancy's own nothing-matters-seriously approach to life. The abiding background memory of this novel is of blinding summer sunlight and radiant heat in the English countryside. The foreground is filled with old aristocratic matrons stuck in Edwardiana, young aristocratic freebooting males on the search for wealthy wives, eccentric peers in their delightful asylum modelled on the House of Lords, socially mobile Local Beauties desperate to break into society and aristocratic young ladies on the run from boring husbands and philandering fiancees. The Cotswold village of Chalford doesn't quite register what is hitting it as a pageant is planned and the Union Jackshirts, in the person of the young lady of the big house (actually she's the grand-daughter), Britannia-like and fascist to her bootstraps, attempt to give it that special National Socialist flavour. What follows is delightfully chaotic. This is Mitford in dry-run for her later successes, using her family to superb effect.