In May 1977, young illustrator Posy Simmonds drew her first weekly comic strip for London's Guardian. It began as a parody of girls' adventure stories, commenting on contemporary life, but soon came to focus on three 1950s school friends in their later middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenaged boys; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope, with a stepdaughter and a young baby. First known as Mrs Weber's Diary, and later untitled—usually referred to simply as "Posy"—the strips ran until the late 1980s, and though celebrated for pinpointing the concerns of Guardian readers at the time, they are in fact remarkably undated and bitingly satiric observations of perennial family and social dynamics. This chunky omnibus gathers all of Simmonds's strips, originally appearing in six separate collections.