On a brisk English March day, Dolly is getting ready to marry the Hon. Owen Bigham. Waylaid by the sulking admirer who lost his chance with her, an astonishingly oblivious mother, and her own sinking dread, the bride-to-be struggles to reach the altar with the help of a bottle of rum. The overall effect of the book is very funny in a Forsterian manner, with Dolly Thatcham being out of the same stable as Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View and both the mothers, Mrs Thatcham and Mrs Honeychurch, sharing many appalling similarities. According to the New York Times on its initial appearance, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding ‘shows evidence of quite unusual humour, observation and insight’.

Published as one of the Persephone Classics series, this slim, sardonic and beautifully written novella by a niece of Lytton Strachey’s was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1932.