Download The Housekeeper's Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House AudioBook Free
Working as a housekeeper was one of the very most prestigious careers a 19th and early on 20th 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 grueling physical labor. As yet, her story hasn't been told. The Housekeeper's Story reveals the non-public sacrifices, bitter disputes and travelling ambition that shaped these women's jobs. Using hidden knowledge diaries, unpublished words, and the neglected service archives of our own stately homes, Tessa Boase explains to the extraordinary experiences of five working women who ran a few of Britain's most dominant households. Dorothy Doar was Regency housekeeper for the obscenely wealthy first Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Trentham Hall, Staffordshire. Sarah Wells, a deaf and older Victorian (mother to H.G. Wells), was responsible for Uppark, Western Sussex. Ellen Penketh was Edwardian cook-housekeeper at the impecunious Erddig Hall in the Welsh edges. Hannah Mackenzie ran Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, Britain's first country-house conflict hospital. Elegance Higgens was cook-housekeeper to the Bloomsbury collection at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex for half a century. Revelatory, gripping and unexpectedly poignant, The Housekeeper's Story champions the unseen women behind the English country house.
