Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey

By -
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: the Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle, by the Countess of Carnarvon

I've been seeing this history book all over the book blogs, and was happy to get a chance to read it.  This is the life story of Lady Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, and an exciting life it was.  The family, and the Carnarvon country seat of Highclere Castle, has been the inspiration for the hugely popular Downton Abbey TV series (which I have not yet seen the second season of, so no spoilers allowed!).  The current Countess took the opportunity to tell the real story of the Carnarvon family, which is much nicer and lacks backstabbing sisters or evil footmen.

Almina Wombwell started off as a very pretty debutante with a  dubious background.  She was the natural daughter of somebody (Alfred de Rothschild), which made her very wealthy indeed but an outsider in Victorian England. Even so, young lords needed rich heiresses to keep their estates going, and Almina snagged the Earl of Carnarvon--and luckily for her (unlike many other similar marriages), they were quite happy together.

Almina was good (if extravagant) at running a great house, and before World War I came along, Highclere was a model of its kind.  It all sounds much more pleasant than Downton Abbey, but I guess you can't build a soap opera on nice people.  The Earl was hugely interested in Egyptology and they traveled out to Egypt several times--yep, he was that Lord Carnarvon!--before the war, which of course changed everything.

Almina had realized that she was an excellent nurse, and she established a hospital for severely wounded officers.  At that time, the military had no infrastructure for treating the massive flood of ill and wounded soldiers, and wealthy women like Almina stepped into the breach to provide much-needed care.

After the war, it was back to Egyptology, and the last part of the book mainly covers the great discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb and Lord Carnarvon's sad death.  There is a little bit after that, but the book is really focused on Almina's life as the Countess of Carnarvon.   It's written by the current Countess (and I don't understand why her title is the author information like that, but it is).

I hope that this history will be reissued under a different title in a few years; it's a delightful story in its own right, and doesn't need to be linked with Downton Abbey forever.  When the soap opera is over, the history will still be interesting and real.

Comments

  1. NicoleSeptember 10, 2012 at 9:18 AM

    My friend picked this up at a recent book store run and told me she'd let me borrow it when she's finished. I can't wait - it sounds great.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JenniferSeptember 10, 2012 at 1:03 PM

    I absolutely agree with you about the need for the story to be allowed to stand on its own. Honestly, I thought the true story was much better than the show (although I love the show, too!).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna and SerenaSeptember 10, 2012 at 4:14 PM

    Thanks for participating in the WWI challenge...this sounds like a good one. We've linked to your review and a snippet will appear on Sept. 21 on the main blog page.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more