Upstairs/Downstairs: A Thursday Thirteen

I think if I had lived a hundred years ago I would not have been mistress of a great house.  More likely I would have been a scullery maid!  For a while now I have had a fascination with the whole upstairs/downstairs historical phenomenon and a book with this type of setting is usually an easy sell for me.  Reading Edith Wharton's short story last weekend about a lady's maid put me in the mood for a book of this sort.  The thing is, I've read nearly all the books I own on this subject matter.  I thought I would share my list and (as usual) ask for more reading ideas.  I've read all these books except the Forster and the Green and they are, of course, on my list! 

I was lazy and snagged the product details for each book for my blurbs, as I don't think I can be quite as succinct in my own descriptions.  A good number of these I've posted about on my blog in case you're curious to know more.  I've enjoyed all the books I've read, and now I think I may have to pull out the two I haven't.  Or maybe Edith Wharton's other stories deal with the mistress of the house and their maids...

1. The House at Riverton, Kate Morton - "The House at Riverton is a gorgeous debut novel set in England between the wars. It is the story of an aristocratic family, a house, a mysterious death and a way of life that vanished forever, told in flashback by a woman who witnessed it all and kept a secret for decades."
2. Fingersmith, Sarah Waters - "In Victorian England, an orphan girl is sent to a country estate to work for-and ultimately woo-its young heiress, on behalf of a mysterious benefactor known as Gentleman."
3. The Dark Lantern, Gerri Brightwell - "A fascinating portrayal of a vanished England as well as an unconventional mystery, The Dark Lantern exposes the grand “upstairs” of a Victorian home and the darker underbelly of its servants’ quarters. The clash between the classes makes for a suspenseful novel of mistaken identities, intriguing women, and dangerous deceptions."
4. Nature of Monsters, Clare Clark - "From the highly acclaimed author of The Great Stink comes a consuming, passionate, darkly humorous tale set amid the clamor and chaos of eighteenth-century London."
5. Afterimage, Helen Humphreys - "In a daring, beautiful novel set in the turbulent world of Victorian England, a maid, mistress, and master are drawn into a fateful love triangle."
6. Kept, D.J. Taylor - "Ranging from the loch-sides of Scotland to the slums of Clerkenwell, from the gentlemen's clubs of St. James's to the Yukon wilds, Kept is a gorgeously intricate novel about the urge to possess, at once a gripping investigation of some of the secret chambers of the human heart and a dazzling reinvention of Victorian life and passions.'
7. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte - "A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman’s quest for freedom."
8. Lady's Maid, Margaret Forster - "Young and timid but full of sturdy good sense and awakening sophistication, Lily Wilson arrives in London in 1844, becoming a lady’s maid to the fragile, housebound Elizabeth Barrett. Lily is quickly drawn to her mistress’s gaiety and sharp intelligence, the power of her poetry, and her deep emotional need. It is a strange intimacy that will last sixteen years."
9. The Observations, Jane Harris - "The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Bessy Buckley, the novel’s heroine, is a cynical, wide-eyed, and tender fifteen-year-old Irish girl who takes a job as a maid in a once-grand country house outside Edinburgh, where all is not as it seems. Asked by her employer, the beautiful Arabella, to keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts, Bessy soon makes a troubling discovery and realizes that she has fled her difficult past only to arrive in an even more disturbing present."
10. Markham Thorpe, Giles Waterfield - "Servants know everything. Never trust them. Never fall in love. Ellen, a young maid in the 1840s, enters service at the declining Markham Thorpe: a house where the relationship between masters and servants is not quite it should be. There's one main reason for this, sitting bang in the middle of this mess of sex, power, money and intrigue: the charismatic housekeeper, Mrs Rundell, whose agendas are complex and whose enemies are growing..."
11. Loving, Living. Party Going, Henry Green - "Loving brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War Two, Living of workers and owners in a Birmingham iron foundry. "Party Going" is a brilliant comedy of manners, presenting a party of wealthy travellers stranded by fog in a London railway hotel while throngs of workers await trains in the station below."
12. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro - "A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England."
13. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light - "In Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light gives depth and dignity to the long-overlooked servants who worked for the Bloomsbury intellectuals."