"Rather dated"

Her pseudonyms are Jane Austen characters, I love that!

I don’t think anyone has mentioned Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine yet. Her descriptions of London in the 60s/70s is unsurpassed, I think.
I’m (very slowly) re-reading Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence at present and though obviously very dated there are some characters who seem startlingly modern. The political and intellectual elite don’t seem to have changed much over the last century or so, and rebellious youth likewise.

I grew up reading most of the books mentioned on this thread.
I haven't seen Joanna Trollope mentioned. I think she was still writing until recently but her earlier books were set and published in the 60s.

One of my favourite "dated" writers is Robert B Parker. American gumshoe crime writer. Beautifully witty sparse prose with attitudes of it's time.

Backlisted is great. Not just the books chosen but all the incidental book chat. Agree with Shirley, it’s like being among like-minded booky friends.

Lynne Reid Banks' The L Shaped Room has been mentioned several times. It's very much of its time- the middle class pregnant central character has never socially met a black or a Jewish man (and the descriptions of these characters when they do appear are cringingly awful)

But what dates it the most is that poor destitute Jane is forced to live in the cheap and highly undesirable London Borough of Fulham.

I think PPs on this thread would love the Backlisted podcast. I’ve found lots of ‘rather dated’ books that I’ve loved thanks to its premise of ‘giving new life to old books.’ Barbara Pym’s ‘Excellent Women’ is one; RC Sherriff’s ‘The Fortnight In September, and Dorothy L Sayers’ ‘Gaudy Night’ are two others I’ve read and enjoyed after hearing them discussed on the show.

When I looked around Brooklands and the museum there's a fascinating amount of stuff about Dame Barbara and her motor racing and aviation exploits!

I watched recent repeats of Upstairs, Downstairs (the original). I thought it was boring when I was young but it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. I even bought a couple of secondhand spin off paperbacks.

Barbara Cartland’s book “We Danced All Night” about her life in the Roaring Twenties was very interesting. The writers of the tv show Upstairs Downstairs used Cartland as a model for the Georgina character in the fifth series, which was set in the 1920s. I don’t like her fiction but that autobiography was great.

Someone recommended Jilly Cooper's The Common Years, autobiographical account of her living near Putney Common from 1972. I bet that counts as "rather dated"!

Ooh how lucky that I've already read The Road to Litchfield. Unfortunately, I'm not being modest or anything, I really am I slow reader.

George Orwell is good for contemporary 1930s fiction, and I'm another Barbara Pym fan.

I remember my mum reading it when it was on tv in the 80s with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson

I love “rather dated” books - Dick Francis, PD James, Jilly Cooper.

Riders with it’s accounts of roaring inflation, soaring petrol prices and the general response being to hurl oneself into a vodka and tonic or 16 before driving slap into a wall (no injuries) is something I find faintly cheering. Characters with huge overdrafts who don’t seem to give a shit because they’re too busy bonking someone glorious, while in real life I’m unglamorously budgeting weekly.

Barbara Pym is wonderful. I want dated sometimes. A relic and record of my youth so I know it wasn’t just me who was there! I don’t always want character relationships to develop by whatsapp or revelations discovered through their Twitter feed. Normal people know that not all attitudes of the past are to be acted out in this world but a fictional flashback can stir positive feelings as well.

I spent my afternoon trawling charity shops in search of a hard copy of The Road to Lichfield (and didn’t find one - though I managed to read it online thanks to Open Library) but I did find a hitherto-unknown-to-me novel by another excellent Rather Dated writer - Elizabeth Jenkins. Her last book, actually; A Silent Joy.

@woodhill
Yes, Olivia Manning wrote Fortunes of War.

Here's one I love, from 1996, whose central premise would barely work in the era of mobile phones (with a major plot twist around a rural phone box), Libby Purves: A Long Walk in Wintertime.

Yes, I think you're right, Polkadots. E.g. novels from around the turn of the millennium often include correspondence by email, which seems old-fashioned now (at least, for personal communications rather than work) yet had only really got going in the 1990s. As time goes on, the advent of social media will come to be seen more and more starkly as a cultural watershed.

I think things from the 90s/early 2000s might very quickly seem "dated" because technology has changed so much so quickly.

I spent longer explaining an Animal Ark short story to a group of children than it actually took to read it (she rode a pony to a phone box, with a landline number written on a sweet wrapper to call for help).

The Cherub and Alex Rider books were written to be modern, and yet flip phones/Gameboys etc now seem old.

The ones I think are dated are Jilly Cooper, or anything with a lot of drink driving and smoking really!

Excellent intro @Antarcticant . I've not read any Penelope Lively for years.

Did she write Fortunes of War?

I've created a thread!

www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join

I hope this introduction meets with everyone's approval, but if I have missed or misrepresented anything important please add your amendments.

I’m now reading it!

Totally agree. A Road to Lichfield also sounds good as I had just ordered it!