Set among the Hamptons villages of Long Island, Mills's first novel is a postwar mystery involving secret romances, class tensions and a Basque fisherman who catches the corpse of a wealthy young woman in his fishing nets.
Even when she went far afield of her specialty, as with "Public Affairs, Private Relations" (1991), a novel about romance and class differences in Washington, she threw in comments about manners.
As a literary curiosity, this story of romance and class conflict in a socially unsettled London is fascinating, anticipating many of the thematic threads more gently plied by Jane Austen.
Opening nights bring out paparazzi and camera crews, and the regular screenings of classic foreign films have as much style, romance and class as the converted Victorian hotel building and its location, a stone's throw from the famous Pera Palace Hotel.
There and before understanding what he's agreed to do, Leo becomes an eager "postman" delivering letters between upper-class Marian (Gemma Sutton) and rugged lower-class farmer Ted Burgess Stuartt Wardeveloping developintointo as doomed a romance as the class difference destines it to be.
ITV will hope Fellowes' adaptation of Anthony Trollope's novel – with its plot of romance across the class gulf, and the precariously wealthy needing to shore up their fortunes through judicious marriages –fills the gap left by the final slamming of the green baize door on Downton Abbey.
During these travels he had a brief romance with, but class differences again prevented his marrying his new love.
The story involves the cross-class romance of the photographer (Claudette Colbert) and a laborer (Fred MacMurray), and it takes seriously the question of their cultural clash.
This anachronism seems intended to nudge the viewer away from passive consumption of a high-class romance and toward a consideration of the systems underlying these lives.
But the heart of this lampoon of sentimental romance and middle-class society is a verbal wit that still sparkles two centuries later.
