http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daisy-goodwin/downton-abbeybooks_b_5659098.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
Daisy Goodwin Become a fan
Author, 'The Fortune Hunter'


Email
If You Like 'Downton Abbey' You'll
LOVE These Books
Posted: 08/08/2014 8:11 am EDT Updated: 10 minutes ago
o
o
Four years ago I published my first novel. In the U.K. it is called My Last Duchess, a
fancy reference to a poem by Robert Browning, but the U.S. title, The American Heiress,
makes the subject matter clear. The American Heiress is about a "dollar princess" called
Cora, who to satisfy the social ambitions of her mother, comes to England in the 1890's
looking for to marry an Englishman with a title. Although she succeeds brilliant by
"landing" and falling in love with a duke, she finds life in an English country house, with
its complicated hierarchy of servants and an overbearing mother-in-law who despises
her American ways, very taxing to navigate.
It sounds like the prequel to "Downton Abbey", and indeed that is what I thought when I
watched the first season of "Downton" unfold a month after My Last Duchesswas
published in the U.K. Julian Fellowes, the creator of "Downton", might also have been
looking over my shoulder as I was writing (although I think I would have noticed) or
perhaps we had both been reading the same books.
So as someone whose passion for the niceties of under-butlers and ducal precedence is
matched only by Lord Fellowes's, I can reveal the books that inspired me and possibly
him to write about American women and English country houses.
The best book written by an American heiress is The
Glitter and the Gold, by Consuelo Vanderbilt, the greatest of the 500 American
women who married into the English aristocracy before the First World War. Beautiful
and eye-wateringly rich, the author was forced by her mother, Alva, into a marriage with
the unappetising Sixth Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo loathed the duke, but quite
enjoyed living in Blenheim Palace and entertaining royalty. Her biggest problem was the
servants. When she wanted a fire lit (Blenheim had no other heating), she rang for the
butler -- who looked affronted and told her that he would summon the footman who was
responsible for lighting fires. In the end Consuelo lit the fire herself.
Of course, like all autobiographies, this memoir is a cunning blend of fact and fiction. If
you want to know what really happened, it is well worth reading Consuelo and Alva, by
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, which is a terrific double biography of the Duchess of
Marlborough and her formidable mother.
American girls in English country houses have been
turning up in fiction since Henry James sent Isabel Archer to have tea on an English
summer afternoon inThe Portrait of a Lady. Late nineteenth century novelists loved
introducing American girls as a metaphor for New World energy and enterprise.
Anthony Trollope sent another Isabel, Isabel Boncassen, the daughter of an American
senator, to bewitch the Duke of Omnium's heir, Lord Silverbridge, in The Duke's
Children. The Duke is dead set against his son marrying a vulgar American, but once he
meets Isabel he can't hold out for very long.
The gradual interweaving of English and American high society is described in Frances
Hodgson Burnett's wonderful novel The Shuttle, published in 1907, which has a
sprightly American heiress, Bettina Vanderpoel, triumphing over the dastardly Sir Nigel
Anstruthers, who has married her sister Rosalie for her money and incarcerated her in
his country pile.
No American girl, heiress or otherwise would dream of
getting on the boat without a copy of Titled Americans: A List of American Ladies Who
Have Married Foreigners of Rank. This magazine, which was published quarterly in the
1890s, also had a "carefully compiled list of peers who are supposedly eager to lay their
coronets and incidentally their hearts, at the feet of the all-conquering American Girl."
This fascinating document has just been reissued with a new subtitle,The Real
Heiresses' Guide to Marrying An Aristocrat. It's like a Victorian version of
Match.com.
But the best novel about all-conquering American girls has to be The Buccaneers.
Edith Wharton wrote her last novel (she died before she could finish it) in 1937, but it is
set sixty years earlier. The buccaneers are a quartet of American girls who stage a raid on
the English aristocracy and make great marriages. Nan, the heroine (who is clearly based
on Consuelo Vanderbilt), makes the fanciest match of all and marries the Duke of
Tintagel -- but finds that life as a Duchess is not the happy ending she expected.
"Downton" fans who revel in the details of country house
life will enjoy The Edwardians, by Vita Sackville-West. Vita, who grew up at Knole,
one of the grandest country houses in England in the late nineteenth century, writes
about what she knows. Her hero, Sebastian, is the heir of Chevron, a magnificent estate
with a legion of servants, including a man who is employed simply to wind the clocks.
The book is candid about the corridor-creeping habits of the Edwardian upper classes:
There was the adulterers' bell that rang at 5 a.m. so that the unfaithful could return to
their rightful beds. No wonder that American girls were shocked by the morals of the
aristocracy they had bought their way into; the standard advice given to girls going into
society was "never comment on a likeness" when meeting someone's children.
The best contemporary imagining of the upstairs/downstairs world is surely The
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is an exquisitely written, deeply
moving story of a butler and his feelings for the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. There are
definite echoes of this book in Carson's relationship with Mrs. Hughes.
English literature is full of books where the house is so
important it is a character in itself - think of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice,
Brideshead in Brideshead Revisited and of course Manderley in Rebecca. But
today, with a few exceptions, the great English country house with its fleet of servants no
longer exists. Highclere Castle, where "Downton" is filmed, is hired out part of the time
as a film set and banquet hall. "Downton Abbey" itself would be most likely be a country
house hotel with a spa in the old stable block. More democratic I suppose, but not nearly
as much fun to read (or write) about.
MORE:
Best New BooksDownton Abbey Books