Pleasing Aunt Edna

Seldom has a popular playwright been so scornfully treated by a later generation than Sir Terence Rattigan (1911–77). As he ruefully commented in, he wrote of an imaginary person called Aunt Edna whom he deemed typical of a middle-class, middle-aged matinee attender, with time on her hands and money to help her pass it, whom playwrights must always take into account. This was seized upon by the upcoming, so-called kitchen-sink school of writers and their critical champions as reflecting his safe conservatism, absence of ideas and emotional repression.