HOUSEKEEPERS TALE (PB)

Revelatory, gripping and unexpectedly poignant, this is the story of the invisible women who ran some of the most prominent English country houses. Working as a housekeeper was one of the most prestigious jobs a nineteenth and early twentieth century woman could want - and also one of the toughest. A far cry from the Downton Abbey fiction, the real life Mrs Hughes was up against capricious mistresses, low pay, no job security and gruelling physical labour. Tessa Boase reveals the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped five women's careers, delving into secret diaries, unpublished letters and the neglected service archives of our stately homes. Meet Dorothy Doar, Regency housekeeper for the obscenely wealthy 1st Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Trentham Hall, Staffordshire; Sarah Wells, a deaf and elderly Victorian in charge of Uppark, West Sussex; Ellen Penketh, Edwardian cook-housekeeper at the sociable but impecunious Erddig Hall in the Welsh borders; Hannah Mackenzie who ran Wrest Park in Bedfordshire - Britain's first country-house war hospital, bankrolled by playwright J. M. Barrie; Grace Higgens, cook-housekeeper to the Bloomsbury set at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex for half a century, an era defined by the Second World War.