Once I finished reading the handful of pocket-sized mass markets that I bought when I first discovered Angela Thirkell, I started looking for other volumes in bookstores. This was one of them and became one of my favorites.

There are several subplots here: the young woman that Miss Bunting is tutoring, who is growing and flowering under her gentle yet firm tutelage; the girl’s nouveau-riche friend, the daughter of an industrialist, who brings different customs to the house; the girl’s parent’s relationship with the friend’s larger than life father who gives so freely and is so antithetical to what they are used to; Robin, the girl’s good friend, who has left part of his foot in Italy and is now home, torn between caring for his declining father who he loves dearly and is so frustrated by and returning to his passion for teaching young boys; and the girl’s parent’s Eastern European maid who is so educationally smart and so humorless and so wanting to learn and also to share her political views whilst serving her beautifully crafted dinners to guests.

But Miss Bunting is the focus of the book, as the title indicates. A governess who has been educating the gentile young of the county houses and aristocrats in Barsetshire for decades and decades, she lives for the children she raised. While, in the last few books, she has specialized in delicate young ladies who aren’t up to the physical demands of school and are, perhaps, a little shy, needing a little help developing social graces, and the courage to display them, Miss Bunting’s heart is filled with the images of the fine young men that she instructed, and her room is filled with their photographs.

Despite her age and declining health – she’s not sick but she requires a nap every afternoon, dines and retires early, and cannot keep up as she used to – Miss Bunting remains placid and unruffled, up to even the most shocking social faux pas.

Yet, when she goes to bed each night, Miss Bunting dreams richly and deeply of flying across the channel in her nighty through the night and smoke, towards the German planes and missiles, arms outstretched as if she could intercede, and crying out, “Kill me but don’t kill my pupils.” Although you would never know it for she reposes in sleep as neatly and composed as she is awake.

Towards the end of the book, as the girl she has been tutoring has grown strong enough to graduate from an educational focus to take her place in society, her parents begin to wonder, who will take Miss Bunting next?

There are times when you are so overwhelmed by feelings that you can’t weep on your own. And so you have to watch Inside Out yet again or that episode of Buffy where her mother dies, or read Miss Bunting, just to crack through your stiff upper lip and allow the feelings out.

And then once the deluge has passed, like Miss Bunting, you can regain your placid façade, always unruffled, always calm, always a port in a storm, and go on with the insanity of life.