Book description
Hancox is the Tudor hall house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore
grew up, and where she lives today. It's a time warp where little has
changed since her family took it on in 1888. They were a diverse family
of doctors and soldiers, liberal politicians and educational pioneers.
What they all had in common though was a habit of writing everything
down and never throwing anything away. Every cupboard and every drawer
is crammed with relics of family history ? letters, diaries,
sketchbooks, photograph albums, even old shopping lists and chequebook
stubs ? which together constitute a huge archive of Victorian and
Edwardian family life containing fascinating stories of love and
jealousy, heroism and defeat, riches and poverty as well as snapshots of
the wider world beyond of Hastings, London and the empire. Told with a
novelist's vigour, Hancox offers a richly detailed portrait of a
vanished way of life: an English country house at the turn of the
twentieth century, just before the tragedy of the First World War, with
its presiding family, its servants, its farm and its local village.
Charlotte Moore was born in 1959. She read English at St Anne's College,
Oxford, and history of art at Birkbeck College, London. She has
published four novels,
Promises Past
, Martha's Ark,
My Sister Victoria
and Grandmother's Footsteps
; and a highly praised account of her life with her two autistic sons,
George and Sam
(Penguin, 2005), based on a column she wrote for the Guardian.
She still lives at Hancox, together with George and Sam, and her third
son, Jake.
