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Books : Madresfield

by: Jane Mulvagh


Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780385607728 ISBN: 0385607725 Label: Doubleday Manufacturer: Doubleday Number Of Pages: 400 Publication Date: June 02, 2008 Publisher: Doubleday Sales Rank: 2168 Studio: Doubleday	Average Rating: List Price: £20.00 Amazon.co.uk's Price: £14.00 You Save: £6.00 (30%) Prices subject to change.
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Editorial Review:

Selina Hastings, Daily Mail:
Scholarly, evocative and beautifully written...a thrillingly vivid historical portrait...a little masterpiece, as rich and rare as the house itself.

Nicholas Shakespeare, Telegraph:
Fascinating history...Mulvagh is a tactful tour-guide...she sets the reader at ease...lays out for the first time the full heartbreaking background.

D J Taylor, Independent on Sunday:
A high-class guidebook in which the human exhibits can be quite as exotic as the objets d'art.

Jane Shilling, The Times:
Mulvagh is an assiduous researcher and writes in an engaging style of graceful anecdote.

Peter Conrad, Observer:
[Mulvagh's] animating touch resuscitates the past and reclads a troop of haughty ghosts in fallible flesh. I loved the tour.

Daily Express:
A delightful work of social history, beautifully written.

Book Description:
The story of the real Brideshead: one home, one family, and a thousand years.

Synopsis:
Madresfield Court is an arrestingly romantic stately home surrounded by a perfect medieval moat, in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. It has been continuously owned and lived in by the same family, the Lygons, back to the time of the Domesday Book, and, unusually, remains in the family's hands to this day. Inside, it is a very private, unmistakably English, manor house; a lived-in family home where the bejewelled sits next to the threadbare, the heraldic and feudal rest easily next to the prosaically domestic. The house and the family were the real inspiration for Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh was a regular visitor, and based his story of the doomed Marchmain family on the Lygons.Never before open to the public, the doors of "Madresfield" have now swung open to allow Jane Mulvagh to explore its treasures and secrets.

And so the rich, dramatic history of one landed family unfolds in parallel with the history of England itself over a millennium, from the Lygon who conspired to overthrow Queen Mary in the Dudley plot; through the tale of the disputed legacy that inspired Dickens' Bleak House; to the secret love behind Elgar's Enigma Variations; and the story of the scandal of Lord Beauchamp, the disgraced 7th Earl.

From the Publisher:
This book came about when Jane Mulvagh met Lady Rosalind Morrison, the present owner of Madresfield Court, and allowed her full access to the treasures of this very private and ancient house of 160 rooms and is the result of five years of loving research. The most sensational part of the story of the Lygons is that of the scandal and disgrace of the 7th Earl in the 1930s, which inspired Evelyn Waugh, a friend of his children, to write Brideshead Revisited. But as Jane delved into the unexplored boxes of the Muniments Room hidden under the lavish painted frescoes of the Chapel, she uncovered many other riches in the story of this one house which has been in the hands of the same family for almost 1,000 years..

From the Inside Flap:
Romantic, turreted, ancient, Madresfield Court, with its one hundred and sixty rooms, spectacular Tudor hall and medieval moat, has been the home of the Lygon family for over nine hundred years. Beneath the Malvern Hills, unmistakably English, it is a lived-in family home in which the sumptuous sits next to the threadbare, the heraldic next to the domestic.

Over the centuries, the Lygons have played their part in history. They were the inspiration and model for the doomed Marchmain family in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: Waugh was a regular visitor in the 1930s, one in a long line of writers, composers, painters, royals and rebels who passed through Madresfield's doors.

Now Jane Mulvagh has been given access to this very special and private house, still lived in by the twenty-eighth generation of Lygons, to explore its treasures and secrets. Drawing on a unique and virtually unknown archive that dates back to the Conquest, she illuminates a rich and dramatic history. From the Lygon who conspired to overthrow Queen mary in the Dudley plot, through the tale of the disputed legacy that inspired Dickens's Bleak House, to the secret love behind Elgar's Enigma Variations, and the scandal of William Lygon, the disgraced seventh Earl Beauchamp, the story of Madresfield unfolds as part of a thousand years of English history.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Madresfield
Jane Mulvagh's book should be called The Lygons to be more accurate. She offers only tantalising glimpses into the house itself, using suspiciously round dimensions to describe the rooms, an implausibly high drawing room ceiling and throws away a comment about 60 bedrooms in her descriptions. If you are looking for a history of Madresfield you'd be better to read 'The Last Country Houses' or the Country Life articles, the latter of which don't make a mention in her bibliography. Her links from the ... Read More

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