Reprinted but once in the seventy-five years since its appearance—and then in a terrible 1970s American mass market paperback—Nancy Mitford’s Wigs on the Green (1935) was for a long time one of the grails of the book collector, a lost gem from the golden age of British comic writing: the age of Wodehouse and Waugh.

Wigs is a satire of something most unfunny: the predilection of parts of the English upper-crust for fascism in the 1930s. The Union of British Fascists isn’t much remembered today, and—as Brooke Allen brilliantly argued in these pages ten years ago—it’s quite possible that its leader, Oswald Mosley, will be best known to future generations as the model for Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode. But three years before there was Spode, there was Wigs and Captain Jack.

He is the leader of the Union Jackshirts, one of whose most fervent followers is the heiress Eugenia Malmains. She is first seen declaiming the glories of fascism to stray citizens of Chalford from an overturned washtub on the village green. Eugenia is beautiful, insouciant, and beset by two young men, Jasper Aspect and Noel Foster, both in search of a wealthy bride. Each, however, is distracted from the business of catching this heiress by a married woman: Jasper by Poppy St. Julien, who has accompanied her friend Lady Marjorie Merrith in her flight from marriage to the Duke of Dartford; Noel by Mrs. Lace, the local beauty who fancies