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: #132266 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.

Customer Reviews

Madresfield
Jane Mulvagh's book should be called The Lygons to be more accurate. She offers only tantalising glimpses into the house itself, using suspiciously round dimensions to describe the rooms, an implausibly high drawing room ceiling and throws away a comment about 60 bedrooms in her descriptions. If you are looking for a history of Madresfield you'd be better to read 'The Last Country Houses' or the Country Life articles, the latter of which don't make a mention in her bibliography. Her links from the brief descriptions of the house to the various family members are facile and 2 dimensional.

However as a history of the Lygon's the book is very good. It makes fascinating reading, particularly on the 20th century Lygons and offers glimpses to a very different way of life that was broken apart by scandal. The Brideshead Revisited inspiration seem undeniable and offers a realistic basis to a 20th century classic.


All in all a good book, but misleadingly titled.

A well thought-out approach to a family history
Full credit for the way this book is laid out, taking a room or a feature and then relating it to a stage in the history of the Lygon family. The main interest for the ordinary reader will be the association with Brideshead Revisited, but there are other connections that are equally fascinating: with the fictional Jarndyce Case in Dickens, and with Edward Elgar. A small caveat on the latter - Mary Lygon is now thought not to be '****' in the Enigma Variations (ref Michael Kennedy), though this is not to deny that she had a close friendship with Elgar. Some excellent pictures, especially of the Arts and Crafts treasures at Madresfield Court.

like the curate's egg, good in parts
I bought this book in the hope it might be like Catherine Bailey's well-written and enthralling Black Diamonds but was very disappointed. It starts out promisingly enough with the first two chapters devoted to Evelyn Waugh's association with the Lygon family, who inspired Brideshead Revisited. Then the author returns to the Anglo-Saxon origins of Madresfield and it is here the tedium begins. Endless recitation of dull lifeless facts about the Lygons and even those ancestors whose lives were obviously full and interesting such as Fernando the corsair and Richard the seventeenth century botanist who went to Barbados and wrote about it fail to come alive under the author's pen. There are several chapters devoted to Puesyism and politics - dry subjects at the best of times but so boring I ended up skipping them and going to the final chapters dealing with the great scandal of Lord Beauchamp's homosexuality and details of what happened to the Lygons' after Brideshead.

Anybody hoping for signs of this book being "one of the best recent monographs on an English family and their country house.." as the blurb on the jacket proclaims will be disappointed. Almost nothing is made of the architecture or the interior of Madresfield apart from some glorious colour photos of some of the rooms and in using objects found in the house as chapter headings as in "The breviary", " the scrap of paper" and so on.

The writing is quite fawning in style, in that no critical word ever escapes the author's pen. Nor is there any evidence of any independent research being done. I am left with the impression that Jane Mulvagh was so overwhelmed at the privelege of being admitted to this most private of houses and its muniments that she took the greatest care not to offend the present members of the family at Madresfield. The result is a very dull book. Surely the Brideshead generation was not the only scandal in nine centuries?