The Housekeeper’s Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House by Tessa Boase
This is a book I read a while ago, and which I can’t stop thinking about.
“Downstairs” nonfiction is a particular favorite of mine–I’ve read lots of books about the lives of servants in country houses, which will provide a lot of blogging fodder here–but this one haunts me.
I describes what is known about the life stories of a handful of housekeepers, some of whom pop up in other books I read (such as The Long Weekend by Adrian Tinniswood) and some of whom I’ve never heard mention of before, not for themselves, not for their employers, and not for the houses in which they served.
If you like Downton/Gosford style glamor, this is not the book for you. This is instead an intensely real domestic history, quoting the womens’ own diaries when possible and pointing out, in a way that a narrative sympathetic to their situation would not, how the circumstances of their lives wore them down.
Because they are worn down, every one. The position of housekeeper has always seemed to me to be the choice one available to women in service, with its authority, salary, and private room, but in actual fact the plush positions were as rare as the truly prosperous houses–that is to say, vanishingly rare. Housekeepers could stay in their positions for decades, but when they couldn’t do their work anymore, they became A Problem–and you know how people tend to deal with Problems.
If this doesn’t sound like appealing reading to you, well, it isn’t, quite. It isn’t glamorous and it feels a lot like rubbernecking at the misfortunes of others, but I do think that this kind of narrative is important. These people were real, there were far more of them than of the gentry they served, and their experiences and treatments cast a keen light on human nature in all its unchanging faults. Reading this book is an exercise both in facing reality and in creating empathy.
And I think, if you read it, it will haunt you, too.
Frost and Fog 