By the 1970s and 1980s writers were looking down their noses at social climbers, in plays like Top Girls and Abigail's Party, in which a middle-class arriviste serves cheesy nibbles and the wrong kind of wine.
Then Violet McKisco, whose prettiness had been piped to the surface of her, so that she ceased her struggle to make tangible to herself her shadowy position as the wife of an arriviste who had not arrived.