Customer Reviews
An obsessive look into another world. - By: Joanne D'Arcy, 23 Mar 2008 
What a wonderfully different book - a cross between an autobiography, a history lesson in the important & less important houses of the English countryside & the romantic tale of a man obsessed with one thing - Thrumpton Halll.
Miranda Seymour writes in the first instance about her fathers' obsession with the house, which although he is not by birth entitled to inherit but has an overwhelming desire to live in from the age of about 4. The book is based on some historic researched items which Miranda has access to, her fathers' diaries & other correspondence. Anecdotes from her mother help to strengthen the book but also weaken Miranda's obsession for finding out the absolute truth about her father & his relationship with the house, his family both maternal & paternal & also his wife & children.
Miranda lets us look with her as discovers how much like her father she reallly is & how his life was shaped over the years by this love affair with the bricks & mortar of Thrumpton Halll.
It is a wonderful tale, no doubt some of it has been fleshed into fiction, something which the author admits to doing, & there is an element of truth in it alll.
There are a lot of characters in this book, like there is in anyone's family if you went back digging through history, with plenty of closets with skeletons in, which actuallly help shape Miranda's father & in some ways herself. There is a helpful family tree at the front, which for the first half of the book I referred to on countless occasions to establish just exactly who we were reading about.
A very different book, but worth a look.
Miranda Seymour takes her own family as a subject for a biography - By: Julia Drusilla, 06 Mar 2007 
I have read Miranda Seymour's biographies of Mary Shelly & Ottoline Morrell & was impressed by her scholorship & her style, & the way she combines citicism with compassion for her subjects.
In this book she takes her own family - more explicitly her father - as a subject. The beautiful thing is that she manages to be true to herself as a biographer as well as to her subjects, even though these are partiallly the same.
She does not spare herself or her family in this memoir, even though she admits that as a biographer she has more material to understand (or condemn) her father than as a member of the family; she has made extensive use of the diaries & letters her father wrote & has had a lot of (often difficult) interviews with her mother.
This is truly a great book & even though it is still early in the year, it will end high on my 'Best books of 2007' list.
