Behind the Facade
The mansions of literature by Eleanor Doughty
WAS the English country house ever so well drawn as in Brideshead Revisited? Even its author, Evelyn Waugh, admitted as much. “It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house,” he wrote in a 1959 preface to a new edition of the novel, which turned 75 this year. “It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay like the monasteries in the 16th century. So I piled it on rather.”
Waugh is responsible for the most famous literary house association of modern times. When in 1981 the television adapation hit our screens, it made a star of the house chosen as the location: Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, home of the Howard family for over 300 years. They were due to celebrate the novel this summer.
Their great stage-set of a home took over a century to build, and was begun in 1699 when Whig politician Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, commissioned Sir John Vanbrugh to build him a house. By 1811 it was finished, its glinting dome covered in gold leaf.
Castle Howard, located 17 miles from York in the Howardian Hills, was known to Waugh. He visited once, recording in his diary on 4 February, 1937, that it was a “pleasant unrestful Holy Week, visiting Castle Howard and entertaining dumb little boys and monks”. Nevertheless, the house was chosen as the setting for the television adaptation, seeming to be closest to Waugh’s fictional house.
Architecturally, this stands up – what with the dome, the fountain, and all that baroque. But socially, Brideshead Castle has its origins elsewhere, at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. The chaotic Catholic Flyte family of Waugh’s novel were based on the chaotic, though not Catholic, Lygon family, friends of Waugh’s whose ancestors had lived at Madresfield since the 1420s.
In the early 20th century, it was owned by William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, who with Lady Lettice Grosvenor, granddaughter of the 1st Duke of Westminster, had seven children – William, Viscount Elmley, the Hon. Hugh, Ladies Lettice, Sibell,
Mary, and Dorothy, and the Hon. Richard. Waugh met the older boys at Oxford in 1922, and became fast friends with the girls.
He got to know Madresfield, too, when Lady Dorothy “Coote” Lygon invited him for Christmas in 1931, and in 1932 he stayed there for almost seven weeks. The house he encountered was a homely one.
“The visitor will not be bowled over by its grandeur,” Jane Mulvagh writes in Madresfield: The Real Brideshead. “There is no need for him to tilt his head back to gaze at a frescoed ceiling high above or to marvel at vaguely recognisable old masters hanging in gilt frames.” This house is rather at odds with the Brideshead of literary fame. But the outdoor setting Waugh describes in the novel could be that of Worcestershire. “A sequestered place, enclosed and embraced, in a single winding valley,” with the house “couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken.”
This is incomparable with the great edifice of Castle Howard, its five-mile tree-lined approach taking the visitor through endless gatehouses. Brideshead Castle, with its dome and columns, hardly pertains to Madresfield at all, beyond the chapel, which had been expensively redecorated in the art nouveau style, with Pre-Raphaelite frescos in powder colours, by Lord and Lady Beauchamp.
Waugh wasn’t the only novelist of his generation to fictionalise familiar houses. His friend Nancy Mitford, eldest of the 2nd Lord Redesdale’s seven children, grew up at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire. When she came to write The Pursuit of Love in 1945, Asthall made it in as Alconleigh, the Gloucestershire home of the Radlett family. For English literature is full of country houses.
“You can go back as far as Marvel and find them,” architectural historian Adrian Tinniswood, author of The Long Weekend, Life in the English Country House Between the Wars, says. By the 20th century, many of the houses depicted in literature had become characters in their own right.
“In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the house is a leading player in the action,” Tinniswood says. “The opening line is ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ It’s a recognisable environment.”
Du Maurier had two houses in mind for the fictional Manderley – Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire, where she visited during World War I, and the early Georgian Menabilly House in Cornwall. Du Maurier’s daughter Flavia Leng remembered her first experience of Menabilly: “[It] had been empty for 20 years, covered in ivy, like a dark green shroud, no windows visible.” The family leased the house, and renovated it. By Christmas 1943 they had moved in.
“The ivy had gone and the windows had been mended. Entering the hall, I was surprised how bright it was, with cheerful rugs on the floor.”
Du Maurier took seriously the influence country houses had on her, even proposing a book about houses
she had known and loved, though it was never written.
Trying to match up fictional houses to their bricks and mortar counterparts is not a modern initiative. In 1925 Sir Frank Mackinnon observed that Jane Austen made precise her fictional geographical locations, but cautioned that she “never deliberated a known place under a fictitious name”.
A game of Austen I-Spy is nevertheless enjoyable.
“It is a conspicuous feature of Austen’s great houses that she will often provide little information about their predominant architectural style,” Dr Robert Clark writes, founder of The Literary Encyclopedia, in the introduction of Jane Austen’s Geographies. “They are therefore hard to visualise and to locate in economic or historical terms.”
This hasn’t stopped speculation, of course. Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, home of the Duke of Devonshire, has long been described as the inspiration for Pemberley, in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. That Austen gave her famous Mr Darcy the Christian name Fitzwilliam has led some to suggest that his house was based on Wentworth Woodhouse, the gargantuan stately home in South Yorkshire, until 1989 home to the Fitzwilliam family.
In the early 19th century, the Fitzwilliams were celebrity landowners, with successful coal mines, and the country’s biggest house. This had been built in 1725 by Thomas Watson-Wentworth (later 1st Marquess of Rockingham), first as a baroque house facing west. When a decade later Palladian designs became more fashionable, a second house in this style was built facing east.
Wentworth Woodhouse, with its
60 ft square Marble Saloon, was so large that guests were given confetti to scatter behind them before dinner to help them back to their rooms. Wentworth would have made a great Pemberley – though there is little evidence to suggest that Austen had visited it.
Her use of familiar aristocratic names such as Fitzwilliam – and Bingley, the title of the Lane Fox family of Bramham Park until 1947 – is, according to Professor Kathryn Sutherland, emeritus professor at St Anne’s College Oxford, “part of the air of reality that she is trying to create”.
Just as the characters in Julian
Fellowes’s fictional Downton Abbey discuss the real towns of Thirsk and Ripon, and invite contemporary figures such as Lady Shackleton to stay, Austen makes the world around her characters appear real. But crucially, they – like her fictional houses – are just characters, Professor Sutherland says. “Some critics read her novels as direct roman-a-clef ,and that’s nonsense. She’s a fiction writer. It diminishes her imagination to suggest that she can’t make stuff up.”
Austen’s interest in the country house extends beyond Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, Professor Sutherland says “she’s obsessed with the country house. Her novels tend to be estate fiction – although she’s writing romances, they are fairly hard-edged romances in that economic subsistence is important to the happiness of her heroine.” Her later novels Mansfield Park (1814) and Northanger Abbey (1817) go further, putting the house in their titles. Over the years, several houses have been offered as the model for Mansfield Park, including Cottesbrooke Hall, and Harlestone House, both near Northampton. Even the famed architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner confirmed these suggestions, noting that they were both “candidates for being the pattern of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park”. Clark’s other theory is that Mansfield Park was based on Castle Ashby, one of the seats of the Marquess of Northampton, rebuilt in 1574 and visited by Elizabeth I in 1600.
The country house continued to be an asset of popular literature through the 19th century. In 1839 Charlotte Brontë visited Norton Conyers near Ripon, home of the Graham family since 1624, and incorporated her experience into her 1847 novel Jane Eyre; when her heroine goes to live at Thornfield Hall. A Dutch-gabled manor with battlements and an oak staircase, Norton Conyers was built in the late 14th century. Thornfield is described as being “three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable”, which fits with the substantial but not huge Norton Conyers.
The discovery in 2004 of an attic staircase, where in the novel the “madwoman” Mrs Rochester is held, stands the theory up. Though Norton Conyers has only recently been renovated after spending some years in near-ruin, Brontë spoils the reader with her interior descriptions of Thornfield. Its dining room contains “purple chairs and curtains . . . walnut-panelled walls, one vast window rich in slanted glass, and a lofty ceiling”, while rooms were kept “in readiness” for the arrival at any time of Mr Rochester.
Jane Eyre explores, seeing “chests in oak or walnut” and “rows of
venerable chairs, high-backed and narrow.” From the outside, “the grey and battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale.” And the room in which Mrs Rochester was kept? A “sad room,” Lady Graham said in 2004. “It is in a cul-de-sac in the attic . . . north-facing with a small gable window.”
Charlotte was not the only Brontë to reference houses she knew in her writing. Several properties have been suggested as inspirations for the houses in Emily’s Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. While Wuthering Heights itself is cold and stark, covetable Thrushcross Grange is warm and inviting.
Heathcliff describes it as “a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables.”
Ponden Hall, near Stanbury, West Yorkshire, has often been named as the model for Thrushcross Grange. Its tree-lined drive of Brontë’s age corresponds with the home of the Heaton family. It was built in 1634, and rebuilt in 1801, and the Brontës regularly visited it to use its library. In 1824 they were walking on the moor when a mudslide occurred, and they took shelter at the house.
Literary and film associations can be a boon for the English country house. Chatsworth served as the location for a 2005 film adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley. In the years since it was first “discovered” as Pemberley, “that suggestion has been ably fanned by Chatsworth’s own tourist industry,” Janine Barchas writes in Austen’s Geographies. According to the Association of Leading Tourist Attractions, over 605,000 people visited Chatsworth in 2018.
Indeed, would Castle Howard, where every year over 225,000 people visit, be a household name were it not for Granada’s adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited?
When in 2010 Julian Fellowes’s team chose the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon’s home of Highclere Castle in Berkshire as the setting for ITV’s
Downton Abbey, this 19th-century “Jacobethan” house by Sir Charles Barry began a new chapter in its life. Never mind that Highclere was the home of the 5th Earl, who with Howard Carter in 1922 discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun – no, it would be for ever associated with the ITV series, about a house very much in Yorkshire.
But if we can’t match up a fictional house with a real-life house, that’s just fine, Tinniswood says. “In Brideshead it’s the chapel at Madresfield that Waugh has in mind, but he’s not a reporter. He makes it up, that’s what novelists do.”