My Lady Peggy Goes to Town

A country beauty goes up to London for a season with a plan, a maid and no money, and finds the town is playing the same game with better cards. Frances Aymar Mathews wrote light comedies of the eighteenth century for an American audience that loved them. The disguises are conventional and the dialogue is quick enough to carry them. Fifty paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, among others, follow the century's look from country houses and castles to portraits and landscapes.