To Say Nothing of the Dog
Bantam
1998
512
Ned Henry is a time traveller from the 2050s, who along with all the other historians of his time is overemployed in an immense folly - the wealthy and formidable Lady Schrapnell is funding extensive time travel in order to reconstruct Coventry Cathedral as it was before it was burned down after an air raid in 1940. Why? Because one of her distant ancestors had her life changed in the cathedral, although nobody's certain how (her diary with the key entry is water-damaged).
Because funding for time travel has dried up since it was discovered that you can't transport "significant objects" forward through time, Oxford University is co-operating with this mad scheme. But Lady Schrapnell's demands are totally unreasonable and everyone is overworked and experiencing the confusion associated with making too many trips through time.
So, inevitably, Ned screws up, not once but repeatedly, when he is sent back to the Victorian era to rest (and return a "significant object" that has somehow defied the rules by being transported through time by another historian, Verity Kindle). There he meets Lady Schrapnell's ancestor, the airhead Tossie Mering (the names tend to be Dickensian; the most obvious is a Professor Overforce who, only partly correctly, attributes all history to "forces" rather than personalities).
Ned and Verity thrash about in the Victorian era, muddying the waters further and further. Ned falls in love with Verity. Several other people fall in love who aren't supposed to marry each other. There are Wodehousian butlers (if P.G. Wodehouse and J.B. Priestley had written a novel together it might have been very like this). There are eccentric dons. There are fake mediums. There are curates. There's an appallingly ugly piece of Victoriana known as the bishop's bird stump which Ned is supposed to locate but, for a long time, can't. There are significant cats and dogs. Eventually the space-time continuum moves in a mysterious and oddly conscious-seeming way to restore everything to the way it should have been.
This was a lot of fun, and I can see why it wasn't classified on the cover as science fiction - it uses a science-fictional premise but it's really a historical romantic comedy. I discovered, when clicking around Amazon, that I've read one of Connie Willis's books before (Bellwether, which was also a lot of fun and only marginally SF if at all, though it was fiction involving scientists). Her characters are fun and the plots enjoyably baroque. She is obviously a very able researcher, but drops her vast store of information into the book in smooth and non-disruptive ways - no "idiot lectures" where characters tell each other what they already know for the benefit of the reader.
A good one.