You may or may not know that I'm doing a huge restructuring of The Winter House. For those who don’t know what it’s about – the basic theme is reincarnation and a karmic debt leaking through from a previous life.

I've been advised to add in more flashbacks to the earlier incarnation, which is set in 1899. To get the flavour right, I'd like to read a couple of books set in – but not necessarily written in - that period, centred around life in a fairly substantial country house. We’re not talking stately homes here, just the sort of place where a prosperous businessman with a large family would live.

So… any suggestions?

Dee

Dee - non-fiction, and covers a bigger period and social range but The Victorian House by Judith Flanders is absolutely unbeatable on the domestic routine of the middle classes.

And she's a little early (say 1880s), but Mrs Oliphant is a very under-rated novelist who operates in just the territory you're looking at. I read Hester years ago, and have been meaning to read more since.

Also how about The Go Between? That's not a hugely grand house (though he thinks it is because it's grander than him)prosperous gentry, no more, as I recall. And childhood memoirs can be good because you hear more about the servants. Diana Athill has a memoir called Yesterday Morning about being brought up in that kind of house.

Emma

Thanks Emma, I'm half-way through The Victorian House already – fascinating book!

Will check out the others when I get home from work tonight.

Cheers

Dee

You could try 'The Victorians' by A.N.Wilson

Katerina

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It's not set in a country house or anything, but might have some interesting facts for you.

Here's a bit about it -

Familiar tales are told about the sexual proclivities, religious hypocrisies and gargantuan economic and imperial appetites of the Victorians. But the book is more than an exercise in debunking. Wilson sees 19th century Britons as the harbingers of modernity: the first society to grapple with and agonise over the Darwinian struggle of social mobility and industrial growth. He documents in detail the relentless drive for getting on, sympathises with its victims--in the English towns, the Irish bogs and on the Indian plains – and warms to the critical commentary of the chief sages and seers of the era: Carlyle, Dickens, and Manning. The intellectual set-pieces of the time--the Gothic revival, religion versus science, Anglo-Catholicism--are particularly well-handled.

Isn't The Victorian House fab?

One other thought is Period Piece, by Gwen Raverat - it's a classic memoir, still in print, of growing up in Cambridge in the 1880s and 1890s, not the country, but the right size of household, I'd have said, and wonderful on things like how chaperoning worked and dinner parties and bicycles and the horrors of Dancing Class. She was an artist, and the illustrations are wonderful.

Emma

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Katerina's post (sounds fascinating, Katerina, must get hold of it) reminds me of Lawrence James's The Middle Class, which again is more socio-political, but very good and also readable.

I think I've posted this fairly recently, but Deb's Historical Research Page here:

http://home.insightbb.com/~d.lawson/

is huge and brilliantly useful.

Emma

How about Dickens? He might add some flavour. Or maybe Thomas Hardy?

Glad to see TWH make a reappearance Dee.

JB

Katerina, thank you! I will definitely get that. the specific angle I'm looking at is the ‘relationship’ between the men of the family who lived in such houses and their female servants. So your suggestion is a must.

Emma, lots of snippets from Gwen Raverat in The Victorians (you do have an illustrious heritage, don’t you… ) so I think I’ll see if I can get hold of that one as well.

JB, I love Thomas Hardy – good idea! Feel a Tess of the Durbervilles moment coming on.

Cheers

Dee

Hardy should be great for 'atmospherics'. Good luck with it all.

JB

I missed this.

I was going to recommend the Victorian House.

Also Victorian London by Eliza Picard is good for an overview. It's very easy to use, and you don't have to be setting your book in London for it, as thre's lots about class and stuff.

I do have - form my granny - a Reader's Digest book called, 'The English Country House'. I can send it you if you WW me your address.

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Might be a bit too stately home-ish, though

Sapph, that sounds like it might be useful. The problem is, I'm not very good at borrowing books because I hate returning them! LOL. Could you get me the ISBN so I can Google it?

Cheers

Dee

Erm . . .*whispers* What's the ISBN?

Sorry, Sapph. It’s easy to forget that not everyone knows about this sort of stuff.

International Standard Book Number. Its usually on the back above the barcode. Until the beginning of this year they were 10-digits Now they are 13 because the trade were running out of numbers.

They’re complicated, but this link explains:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN-13

Dee


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arghh! ... it's

Dee - slightly late for what you're looking for and not really about the relationship of the men of the family with the servants, but maybe Rosamund Lehman's 'Invitation to the Waltz' which is set before WW1 might give you some useful near period detail.

It also might be seeing what's on the Persephone Books list.


Naomi R

Is Invitation to the Waltz Lehmann pre-first war? I'd forgotten, but that makes me remember that most of Dusty Answer is, and also consists of two biggish country houses set side-by-side.

Emma