Book description
Madresfield Court is an arrestingly romantic stately home 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 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.
Jane Mulvagh
read history at Cambridge and is the author of a biography of Vivienne
Westwood. She lives in Yorkshire and London, and has been researching
Madresfield
for the last three years.
