The Edwardian period has been of special interest to me lately, so it was quite a find to come across Kate Morton's The House at Riverton (it is only available in the UK at the moment, but it will be published here in the US in April of 2008). Although the novel begins in 1914 towards the end of the Edwardian period, it is set primarily in a country manor house and it just oozes the whole upstairs/downstairs feeling.
The story is told in the form of flashbacks by Grace, who was a housemaid and later lady's maid to the Hartford family at their country estate, Riverton. At the age of 14 Grace is sent there to begin work in service to the family. She's particularly drawn to the Hartford children, Hannah, Emmeline and David--Hannah being the closest in age to Grace. As a servant Grace is practically invisible to the family, but she watches them. She forms a bit of a bond with Hannah that eventually will lead her into the more significant role as lady's maid. There is so much that happens in this book that it would be hard to summarize it here. I won't be giving anything away by saying that this is a twisty turny tale that will involve the death of a young poet, as well as many buried family secrets.
I've read some reader's reviews of the novel and they tend to be good, but still a bit mixed. It is a novel that starts out slowly and builds towards the middle (once I got about halfway through the novel I didn't want to put it down!). It is an old woman telling the story from her deathbed (ready to give up the family secrets finally) and it does meander a bit, but it still seemed well formulated to me. Grace has lived through the 20th century--more than a decade in service as a servant, two world wars, many deaths, a failed marriage, a career as an archaeologist and everything else that came after. Some have criticized Grace's knowledge of so many of the family's secrets as well as being able to recollect so much later in her life. As a servant she would have been privy to many family happenings--not to mention gossip, which had to be rife in a house like that. As for her having such a great memory for dialog, I can only say I consider that a plot device. Most people probably couldn't remember so much so well, but I am willing to suspend belief a bit if I am enjoying the story, which I really did. For myself I was so interested with the descriptions of life then I didn't mind if the story did take its time to be told. All in all I thought this was a thumping good read (as the Common Reader catalog deemed such books that you couldn't put down).
It felt as I was reading that the author must have really done her homework. There is a pretty extensive list of resources she used in her research. I thought I might list a few of them here. Some I have read or watched, and I will be looking into the others as well. I'm not really sure what my fascination with this period is. It might have been nice to live then if you were an upstairs occupant of a grand house, perhaps less so if you were of the lower class. I suppose so much happened at this time between wars and women's suffrage and the plight of the poor, hearing people's stories can be very riveting. Here are a few more books to add to the list of Edwardian reading:
- The Rare and the Beautiful, Cressida Connolly
- 1939: The Last Season, Anne de Courcy
- The Viceroy's Daughters, Anne de Courcy
- Vita , Victoria Glendinning
- Mitford Girls, Mary S. Lovell
- Life in a Cold Climate, Laura Thompson
- Channel 4's The Edwardian Country House (I watched this a while back and this is part fueled my current interest)
- Voices from the Trenches: Letters to Home, Noel Carthew
- Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen
- Paris 1919 Margaret Macmillan
- Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Max Arthur
- Sweet and Twenties, Beverly Nichols
- Myself When Young, Daphne Du Maurier
- Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman
- Chatham School Affair, Thomas H. Cook
- The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
- Dark-Adapted Eye, Barbara Vine
- Half Broken Things, Morag Joss
You can check out Kate Morton's website here.