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Summary
Summary
As the Season of 1899 comes to an end, the world is poised on the brink of profound, irrevocable change. The Earl of Dilberne is facing serious financial concerns. The ripple effects spread to everyone in the household. Lord Robert can see no financial relief to an already mortgaged estate, and, though the Season is over, his thoughts turn to securing a suitable wife and dowry for his son. The arrival on the London scene of Minnie, a beautiful Chicago heiress, seems the answer to their prayers.
Summary
From the award-winning novelist and writer of Upstairs Downstairs, the launch of a brilliant new trilogy about what life was really like for masters and servants before the world of Downton Abbey
As the Season of 1899 comes to an end, the world is poised on the brink of profound, irrevocable change. The Earl of Dilberne is facing serious financial concerns. The ripple effects spread to everyone in the household: Lord Robert, who has gambled unwisely on the stock market and seeks a place in the Cabinet; his unmarried children, Arthur, who keeps a courtesan, and Rosina, who keeps a parrot in her bedroom; Lord Robert's wife Isobel, who orders the affairs of the household in Belgrave Square; and Grace, the lady's maid who orders the life of her mistress.
Lord Robert can see no financial relief to an already mortgaged estate, and, though the Season is over, his thoughts turn to securing a suitable wife (and dowry) for his son. The arrival on the London scene of Minnie, a beautiful Chicago heiress with a reputation to mend, seems the answer to all their prayers.
As the writer of the pilot episode of the original Upstairs, Downstairs --Fay Weldon brings a deserved reputation for magnificent storytelling. With wit and sympathy--and no small measure of mischief-- Habits of the House plots the interplay of restraint and desire, manners and morals, reason and instinct.
Author Notes
Fay Weldon was born in Worcester, England on September 22, 1931. She read economics and psychology at the University of St. Andrews. She worked as a propaganda writer for the British Foreign Office and then as an advertising copywriter for various firms in London before making writing a full-time career.
Her work includes over twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children's books, non-fiction books, and a number of plays written for television, radio and the stage. Her collections of short stories include Mischief and Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide. She wrote a memoir entitled Auto Da Fay and non-fiction book entitled What Makes Women Happy. She wrote the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs.
Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967. Her other novels include Praxis, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Puffball, Rhode Island Blues, Mantrapped, She May Not Leave, The Spa Decameron, Habits of the House, Long Live the King, and The New Countess. Wicked Women won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She was awarded a CBE in 2001.
Fay Weldon died on January 4, 2023, in a nursing home in Northampton, England, at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Before there was Downton Abbey, there was Upstairs, Downstairs, and, having written the first episode of that iconic television series, it is only fitting that Weldon now returns to the scene of the crime to further explore the disparate worlds of them that has and those what serve 'em. On the brink of the twentieth century, all is not well in the House of Dilberne. The earl has gambled away most of his patrimony and lost the remainder in an ill-timed investment. Inspired by his own fortuitous marriage to Isobel, daughter of a wealthy coal baron, his lordship's only hope of saving the family bacon is to marry his son, Arthur, off to the daughter of an American businessman. What with Arthur's predilection for a local trollop and preoccupation with experimental automobiles, this won't be an easy task. Luckily, there's a mansion's worth of dubiously loyal maids, butlers, and cooks to conduct vital backroom negotiations. Always a ripe target for mockery and disdain, the British aristocracy comes in for a thorough drubbing in Weldon's snarky send-up. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The first novel in beloved British writer Weldon's new series launches with a hefty print run and all-out national marketing campaign carrying the banner, Poised for Bestsellerdom. --Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The Earl of Dilberne and his countess wife find themselves in the sort of pickle that tends to elicit shrugs of "whatever" from the untitled slobs among us: Nasty turns in the Boer War have sunk the earl's gold-mine investments, imperiling his mortgaged 45-bedroom country estate. Nouveau poverty has also dulled the marital prospects of the couple's willfully unmarried offspring: Arthur, whose cushy allowance enables him to budget in a salaried concubine, and Rosina, a professed New Woman who regurgitates progressive mantras like a Shavian marionette. The family's only hope for salvation lies among the invading parvenus: their Jewish financial adviser, and the stinking-rich daughter of a flatulent Chicago meat baron and a mouthy ex-burlesque queen. Sufferers of "Downton Abbey" fatigue, beware: this novel features the expected pileup of withering insults and a gaggle of gossipy, envelope-steaming servants who turn out to be snobbier than their employers. If we must have more manor-house intrigue, however, let it be satirized by Weldon, whose flair for capturing the grudging envy shared by the British and their colonial counterparts is worth more than its market value in fool's gold.
Guardian Review
Fay Weldon is anything but predictable. Long claimed by feminists as one of their own, albeit one who refused to stick to the script, she has become, in recent years, an outspoken advocate of men's rights. After decades of urging women to be bad, she concluded in 2006's What Makes Women Happy that the answer was being good - and chocolate. Several years ago, at the age of 69, and after a lifetime of atheism, she was baptised into the Anglican church. Such apparent volte-faces should come as no surprise. Since she published The Fat Woman's Joke in 1967, Weldon has defied categorisation. Experimental in form, and vernacular in style, her work is distinguished not only by her virtuosity as a writer but by her fearlessness, her refusal to accept orthodoxies. From plastic surgery and cloning to corrupt politics and the spread of militarism, her novels explore subjects that are both topical and controversial. Her dissection of ordinary lives is always sharp-eyed and frequently shocking. In Weldon's world, women are not docile, domestic creatures but angry and implacable. They binge-eat, hate their children, burn down their houses, and exact revenge against their faithless husbands; often, they are to blame for their own predicaments. They are also brave, feisty and extremely funny. The prospect of Weldon's vigorous iconoclasm being brought to bear on the historical novel was therefore thrilling. It seemed particularly characteristic that she would choose to set her story in 1899, an era whose charms have been so relentlessly milked. Weldon herself wrote the pilot episode for the original series of Upstairs, Downstairs; since then the period has been worked over exhaustively by romantic novelists and glossy Sunday night dramas such as Downton Abbey. Awash with cliche and stock characters, turn-of-the-century London seemed ripe territory for Weldon's subversive pen. The novel opens with the clamorous dawn arrival at 17 Belgrave Square of Mr Baum, a young man deemed by Grace, the lady's maid who spies him from the window, to be "too young, too excitable and too foreign-looking to be worthy of much exertion". Though the household resolutely ignores Mr Baum's summons, so that the master of the house himself is obliged to open the door, it transpires that he has brought news that is to prove potentially catastrophic to the Earl of Dilberne and his family, and which considerably intensifies the countess's desire to marry off their two adult children profitably and without delay. With nearly one hundred pages devoted to this inauspicious day, the stage is set for a comedy of manners. Weldon has kept her focus narrow, so that although contemporary politics occasionally impinge, it remains almost exclusively domestic. The plot might flatteringly be called flimsy, but this would have mattered less if Weldon had not borrowed her characters directly from the BBC casting cupboard. They are all here, from the doughty cook and the frustrated housemaid to the stodgy but reasonable-minded earl and his two children, the dilettante, spendthrift heir and his difficult suffragette sister who refuses to marry; most are sketchily drawn, as though they are awaiting a charismatic actor to breathe some life into them. Stereotypes are rife. The English upper classes are uptight and hypocritical; new-money Americans are vulgar and brash and do not know the proper way to address a servant. The servants are grumbly but good-hearted. They even have names like Grace and Smithers. If there is irony intended here, it is not sufficiently in evidence. Extended paragraphs of reported speech, not to mention exhaustive descriptions of the characters' outfits, add to the impression of a book written primarily as an outline for a television series. The novel has some funny moments, such as the scene when the earl's son Arthur encounters his old Eton fag in flagrante with the prostitute he understood to be his exclusive property. The relationship between Arthur and the American heiress his family would have him marry is fresh and endearing enough to have one rooting for a happy ending. But the treats are too few and far between. Habits of the House is lacklustre, a pastiche without a purpose, lacking both the intellectual heft of Weldon's previous novels and their sly savagery. Endless discussions of dinner menus and Liberty patterns and the complexities of social etiquette might provide a convincing exposition of the dullness of being an Edwardian aristocrat but they do little to enliven the narrative. Weldon's prose has an easy grace that ensures that the pages slip by without undue difficulty, but they don't stick. One is left craving the verve and originality of her earlier novels and wondering just what it was about this story that made her want to write it in the first place. Clare Clark's Beautiful Lies is published by Harvill Secker. To order Habits of the House for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Clare Clark The prospect of [Fay Weldon]'s vigorous iconoclasm being brought to bear on the historical novel was therefore thrilling. It seemed particularly characteristic that she would choose to set her story in 1899, an era whose charms have been so relentlessly milked. Weldon herself wrote the pilot episode for the original series of Upstairs, Downstairs; since then the period has been worked over exhaustively by romantic novelists and glossy Sunday night dramas such as Downton Abbey. Awash with cliche and stock characters, turn-of-the-century London seemed ripe territory for Weldon's subversive pen. - Clare Clark.
Library Journal Review
Weldon, who wrote the pilot episode of the original Upstairs Downstairs, returns to the Edwardian era with the tale of the Dilbernes, a once-grand family striving to regain former glory. Poor investments and rising expenses have left the Earl of Dilberne with no choice but to marry off one of his sons to an American heiress, but this infusion of new money has unanticipated consequences. Weldon's return to her roots is as enjoyable as those early episodes of Upstairs Downstairs, mixing high drama and historical accuracy with humor. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The House Awakes 6.58 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899 IN LATE OCTOBER of the year 1899 a tall, thin, nervy young man ran up the broad stone steps that led to No. 17 Belgrave Square. He seemed agitated. He was without hat or cane, breathless, unattended by staff of any kind, wore office dress - other than that his waistcoat was bright yellow above smart striped stove-pipe trousers - and his moustache had lost its curl in the damp air of the early morning. He seemed both too well-dressed for the tradesman's entrance at the back of the house, yet not quite fit to mount the front steps, leave alone at a run, and especially at such an early hour. The grand front doors of Belgrave Square belonged to ministers of the Crown, ambassadors of foreign countries, and a sprinkling of titled families. By seven in the morning the back doors would be busy enough with deliveries and the coming and going of kitchen and stable staff, but few approached the great front doors before ten, let alone on foot, informally and without appointment. The visitor pulled the bell handle too long and too hard, and worse, again and again. The jangling of the bell disturbed the household, waking the gentry, startling such servants who were already up but still sleepy, and disconcerting the upper servants, who were not yet properly dressed for front door work. Grace, her Ladyship's maid, peered out from her attic window to see what was going on. She used a mirror contraption rigged up for her by Reginald the footman, the better to keep an eye on comings and goings on the steps below. Seeing that it was only Eric Baum, his Lordship's new financial advisor and lawyer, Grace decided it was scarcely her business to answer the door. She saw to her Ladyship's comfort and no one else's. Baum was too young, too excitable and too foreign-looking to be worthy of much exertion, and her Ladyship had been none too pleased when her husband had moved their business affairs into new hands. Grace continued dressing at her leisure: plain, serviceable, black twill dress - a heavy weave, but it was cold up here in the unheated attics - white newly laundered apron, and a pleated white cap under which she coiled her long fair hair. She liked this simple severity of appearance: she felt it suited her, just as the Countess of Dilberne's colourful silks and satins suited her. Her Ladyship would not need to be woken until nine. Meanwhile Grace would not waste time and energy running up and down stairs to open the front door to the likes of Mr Baum. A sensible man would have gone round to the servants' entrance. 'Bugger!' said Elsie the under housemaid, so startled by the unexpected noise that she spilled most of a pan of ash on to the polished marquetry floor. She was cleaning the grate in the upstairs breakfast room. Grey powder puffed everywhere, clouding a dozen mahogany surfaces. More dusting. She was short of time as it was. She had yet to set the coals, and the wind being from the north the fire would not draw well and likely as not smoke the room out. This was the trouble with the new London houses - the Grosvenor estate architects, famous as they might be, seemed to have no idea as to where a chimney should best be placed. At Dilberne Court down in the Hampshire hills, built for the first Earl of Dilberne in the reign of Henry VIII, the chimneys always drew. No. 17 Belgrave Square was a mere rental, albeit on a five-year lease. The servants felt this was not quite the thing; most of the best families liked to own and not rent. But the best families were also the landed families; and land was no longer necessarily the source of wealth that it had always been since the Norman Conquest. Elsie, along with the majority of the domestic staff, lamented the annual migration to London for the Season, but could see its necessity. The Dilberne children needed to be married off; they were too troublesome single. The young Viscount, Arthur, needed a wife to grow him up, and to give him the children he needed for the succession to the Dilberne title and estates: he was nearing twenty-six, so at least had some time to spare. Rosina, at twenty-eight, most certainly did not. The urgency was greater since she was no beauty and had recently declared herself to be a New Woman and resolved never to marry. London was the place for them to be, but the Season ended in August and here they all still were in October. The change in routine unsettled everyone. Everyone knew Lady Isobel much preferred giving balls and dinner parties in town to hosting weekends in the country. The rumour also was she hated hunting, being afraid of horses - though otherwise fearless - and was out of sympathy with the male passion for shooting birds. This year the shoots had been let out to neighbouring estates. And also his Lordship had found himself obliged to spend more time in the House of Lords since the trouble in South Africa had flared up. Apparently he had business interests in the area. Neither Mr Neville the butler, nor Reginald the footman had discovered quite what these were: short of steaming open letters when they arrived (which Reginald wanted to do but Mr Neville forbade, for in his view reading letters left around was legitimate, steaming was not) there was no way of finding out. Mr Baum the lawyer carried documents away with him, or his Lordship locked them safely in the safe. And Elsie had overheard his Lordship say to her Ladyship that he could not forever be travelling up and down from Hampshire to attend the House, so they would stay in London until the New Year. Elsie, personally, thought the smart new gambling dens in Mayfair and the company of his new friend the Prince of Wales was probably a greater attraction for his Lordship than politics. Elsie had been with the family for some fifteen years and knew as well as any what went on. 'Three monkeys, three monkeys!' Mrs Neville would urge - 'hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil' - in an attempt to tamp down the servants' hall gossip, though in fact she was as bad a culprit as anyone. And Grace, her ladyship's personal maid, would point out that since upstairs saw so little need to preserve their privacy in front of the servants, any more than they did in front of their dogs, they hardly deserved any. All wished Grace would not say this kind of thing; it smacked of disloyalty and the servant's hall, no matter how much it grumbled and complained, knew that by and large it was well off, and happy enough. Elsie was not prepared to open the front door, no matter how hard and repeatedly the caller pulled the bell: there was smut on her face and she was not yet in her cap and apron. Anyway it was Smithers' job. Elsie would wait for a direct instruction from someone higher in the hierarchy. This overlong stay in London meant she missed her sweetheart. Alan was a gamekeeper on the Dilberne estate; they were saving to be married. The sooner that happened the better if she was ever to have children. On the yearly trips to London, as it was, Alan, back in Hampshire, consoled himself with drink and frittered the money away. By the New Year there would be precious little left. Elsie was not in a good temper these days, and she was tired of working in a cloud of ash. There were few cabs about at this early hour, and since receiving the morning telegrams from Natal, Baum had taken a bus, but half-walked, half-run much of the way between Lincoln's Inn Fields where Courtney and Baum had their offices, and the Square. He did not grudge the effort, since on the whole he wished the Earl of Dilberne well, and had certainly lent him enough money in the past to want the debt repaid, and the sooner his Lordship's affairs were in order the sooner that would happen. But while Eric Baum pulled and pulled the bell and no one came, he began to feel aggrieved. Copyright © 2012 by Fay Weldon Excerpted from Habits of the House by Fay Weldon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
