Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194070 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 383 pages

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.