THE ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE (4/5)

Founded in 1994, THE COURSE offers art history lectures, opera and literature courses, guided museum visits and London walks.

In this 5 part series, Jeremy Musson, will explore the way in which the English country house has been portrayed in English literature. By studying various authors, the architecture and household roles of the country house underline characterization, scene and mood and how this in turn shaped our view of the country house in English visual culture. The authors’ personal experiences will be examined and considered for the value of the country house in terms of plot. Used as a vehicle for gathering a group of characters together under one roof for a defined space of time, the country house has long provided a convenient setting in which, as Blake Morrison has commented, tensions can develop, love affairs begin and catastrophes unfold.

P.G. WODEHOUSE AND EVELYN WAUGH

In the 4th lecture, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse provide some of the most unforgettable accounts of English country house life – Blandings Castle, Deverill Hall and Brinkley Court. As a child, he had stayed at Weston Park and Corsham Court, where he took tea in the servants’ hall. His observations of their roles make these books valuable as an evocation of this vanished world. Waugh’s portraits of the English country house are used as cleverly turned metaphors, from Boot Magna in Scoop to Brideshead in Brideshead Revisted. An especially vivid link to England’s glorious past, the country houses in Waugh’s novels are often threatened by modernization or destruction. In the spring of 1944, it was impossible to foresee that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century.