Made for Masterpiece 
 Helen Simonson may now live in Brooklyn, but she has shown herself a masterly portraitist of small-town English life. With 
 Major Pettigrew's Last Stand 
 , she brought an Anglo-Indian old fogey into the modern age, and showed him to be not such a fogey after all. Now, in The Summer Before the War, she goes back by a century to 1914, to Rye in Sussex, near where she was born. There is certainly a fair share of fogeys, minor aristocrats, matriarchs, and petty officials; some surprise us by how they behave, some are far worse, but through it all runs a vein of English social comedy nurtured in Austen, Trollope, and Forster. Simonson is a dab hand at dialogue, and there are enough bons mots and put-downs to keep Maggie Smith in business for a month. 
 Yes indeed, for the example of Downton Abbey made me realize that Simonson's latest novel is tailor-made for Masterpiece Theatre. It is longer than Major Pettigrew and has a far larger scope: England on the verge of the Great War. In some respects, it is a WW1 version of the PBS WW2 series, Home Fires, showing the effects of war on a small town. Though beautifully concentrated in setting, it offers a wide range of characters. These even include Rye's most famous literary resident, Henry James, though given a new name (and rather longer lifespan) as Mr. Tillingham. Writers are important in the novel: one of the major characters, Daniel Bookham, is a poet in the Rupert Brooke mold, there is a scandalous pair of popular novelists among the minor characters, and the protagonist, Beatrice Nash, is a struggling writer who comes to Rye as a Latin teacher. Her intelligence and spirit, and her utter refusal to play the shrinking violet, make her a most attractive heroine, a woman for our times, yet trapped within the patriarchy and condescension of her own. 
 The title is a misnomer, actually. War is declared on page 100 or so, and there is even a section in the Flanders trenches towards the end. But the first battlefront is in Rye itself. Beatrice is the choice of one of the two grandes dames of the town, Agatha West, the wife of a high Whitehall official. Much of the comedy comes from her success in scoring over her nemesis, Bettina Fothergill, the odious wife of the officious mayor. But disputes over schoolteachers are displaced by more serious things when the first refugees arrive from Belgium, and housing them becomes for some an exercise in conspicuous charity. And from there, we progress to contests over raising recruits to volunteer to Do Their Bit in France. And from there, to France itself. 
 Another Masterpiece Theatre quality is the mixture of narrative genres covered by the novel. Romance, of course. Beatrice Nash is quite determined never to get married, but the astute reader soon wonders how long that will last. There is also an extensive subplot involving the love between two men, though it is never called by name. Another genre is the medical story. One of the characters, Agatha West's nephew Hugh Grange, is a young surgeon; his expertise will involve him in several crises in Rye, and then take him to a field hospital in France (reminding us of yet another PBS series, The Crimson Field). And there is a very strong thread of protest against social injustice: the undervaluing of women, lower classes, gypsies, victims of sexual assault, and people choosing unconventional lifestyles. Despite the context of romantic comedy, such moments made me angry, and very sad. 
 Laughter, romance, intrigue, literary comment, historical insight, and passionate indignation: this is quite a range for a single book. In comparing Helen Simonson's work to Masterpiece Theatre, I know I am labeling it as a popular novel. But it is very good indeed at what it does: Masterpiece-worthy because written by a master.