A House Unlocked

Lively does a great job of linking her ancestry and past to the physical structure and contents of the family's country home. Great detail and description of another time, but it becomes a bit ponderous. I raced through the first half of the book, and plodded through the last quarter.

I am a great admirer of Ms. Lively's work, both fiction and nonfiction, and I think this is a wonderful book. My only disappointment is that there are no photographs in the book--not even an author photo on the jacket cover! Photographs would have raised the book's price, I suppose, and it might seem childish to request them, but when there is such detailed and vivid description of specific objects (that embroidered firescreen, for instance) and people, I don't believe it is unreasonable for the reader to want even more--and to feel a bit cheated. Was it her decision, or a stingy move on the part of her publisher?Still, I love this book and plan to re-read it many times.

Penelope Lively's extended essay centers on the home of her grandmother, who was born in Victorian times and in Edwardian days was a young wife and mother, mistress of a country estate. Through her description of hundreds of items considered vitally necessary to the household, she ponders the cast-in-stone class structure, the assumptions which underlay the roles and behavior of men and women, the status of children, the notions of childcare, the sturdy outdoor motif of country living. The weather, she said, was simply ignored, and people went about what they meant to do, rain or sun. Hunting and gardening figured prominently; many social activities centered around these activities. Americans who know the work of writers like Agatha Christie will be familiar with this English world, dissimilar from our own country especially because of rigid class distinctions. A middle class household, Lively tells us, would be expected to employ servants. Her grandmother could spend hour upon hour doing rigorous physical labor in her gardens, but she felt much put upon when in later days, she was faced with doing her own "washing up" (kitchen dishes and pans). Lively also describes well the distance between genders, the attitude that men and women were utterly different, with different interests and orientations, unlike the more intimate, nose-to-nose marriages that began around mid-century. Lively's essay is composed of personal perceptions, and although I find the limitations of this subjectivity its one drawback, I recommend it as an entertaining view to a vanished era.