Sally Cocksure

In *Sally Cocksure*, Ierne L. Plunket offers a sharp, witty social novel attentive to the manners, assumptions, and self-deceptions of its milieu. The book turns on the figure of Sally, whose confidence and spirited independence animate a narrative concerned with class, gendered expectation, and the delicate negotiations of social life. Plunket's prose is polished and observant, drawing on the comedy-of-manners tradition while also participating in the early twentieth-century English novel's interest in character psychology and the subtle pressures of modern society. Plunket, an Anglo-Irish writer and historian, brought to her fiction an aristocratic upbringing and a cultivated awareness of political and social transition. Her broader literary career, which included historical writing as well as novels, suggests a mind attuned both to the formal patterns of the past and to the changing conditions of contemporary life. Such experience helps explain the assurance with which *Sally Cocksure* renders social nuance and the tensions between convention and female self-assertion. This is a rewarding book for readers interested in women's writing, Edwardian and interwar social fiction, and the evolution of the modern heroine. Elegant, incisive, and historically revealing, *Sally Cocksure* deserves renewed attention as both an engaging narrative and a discerning commentary on its age.