From Publishers Weekly
Using "the furnishings of a house as a mnemonic system," Lively (Moon Tiger) takes readers on an imaginary tour of Golsoncott, the Edwardian country house her grandparents bought in 1923, home to several generations of her family. She recalls the gong stand in the entryway (a symbol of "vanished rituals" calling the family to its meals) and her grandmother's intricately worked sampler, with its row of "skinnies" (representing evacuated children boarding at Golsoncott during WWII) just a few of the many objects that "spun a shining thread of reference" to another era and way of life. In this combination personal/social history, Lively tells of how even the layout of the rooms spoke to changes in thinking over the course of the century. Children were quartered in a nursery wing, far from the adults, not at the center of household life as they are today. Grandfather had his dressing-room separate from grandmother's bedroom; the gender divide in the early 20th century was not a "distinction" so much as a "chasm." Surrounding the house were its gardens, reflecting in their botanical variety the progress of British colonial expansion and commercial enterprise. Family photos with the names of the dogs and horses penciled in recall riding's role in country life and inspire a digression on the history of foxhunting. Despite all this, Lively unlocks more than the house and its century; the author herself is here, a product of both her corseted grandmother and the more modern eras that followed. This is a quietly intelligent, oddly soothing meditation on modernity. (Apr.)Forecast: Fans of Lively's Booker Prize and Whitbread Award-winning novels, Anglophiles, memoir readers and students of material culture will gravitate toward this.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Whitbread Award and Booker Prize-winning novelist Lively's latest book is a mixture of autobiography and social history. The house in question is Lively's ancestral home Golsoncott in Somerset, England, acquired by her grandparents in 1923. In 1995, when the house had to be disposed of, its familiar objects spoke elegiacally of a way of life that had changed in the intervening years. The figures on the embroidered sampler, for instance, recorded the effect of historical events like the Blitz, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust on the inhabitants of Golsoncott; the potted meat jars served as a mnemonic for the state of the Church; and the bon bon dish evoked a social class served by domestic servants. Lively's writing is a palimpsest of past and present on which flit scenes of England's changing mores and rituals. Add to this a narrative graced with fictional elements and felicitous prose and the result is, to borrow Lively's own phrase, "a rattling good read," as absorbing as any of her novels. Highly recommended for all libraries. Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
In the late 1990s, critically acclaimed English author Penelope Lively had to sell her country home, which had been in the family since 1925. It is to our benefit that its loss triggered her decision to "see if the private life of a house could be made to bear witness to the public traumas of a century." In a rich, clear voice, Sheila Mitchell gives a nuanced reading of the fascinating story that resulted. It's a history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England revealed through familial artifacts. The house's extensive tulip garden leads Lively to the botanical adventurers who found the unusual specimens. An unused wing of the house reminds her of the London children housed there throughout WWII, and causes her to explore the way in which that temporary but huge migration changed English society forever. I could keep giving examples--far better that you listen yourself. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Lively's crisp and savvy fiction is intimately tied to place, an orientation she uses with exceptional vision in this fine weave of family and world history. Lively's base of operations is Golsoncott, her grandmother's west Somerset Edwardian country home and the site of many unexpected alliances. Her aunt Rachel was an artist who defied all notions of genteel womanhood, and it was she who transformed Golsoncott into a war nursery during the Blitz, filling it with evacuated children from London's worst slums, an event that prompts Lively to handily dissect the class system. A displaced Russian widow also found sanctuary at Golsoncott, and Lively's account of her harrowing experiences encapsulates the entire wretched story of Russia's epic suffering, just as her profile of the Holocaust refugee who lived at Golsoncott illuminates the plight of exiled Jews. Lively not only uses "the private life of a house . . . to bear witness to the public traumas" of the twentieth century but she also offers incisive, witty, and unfailingly sensitive observations about change and stasis in women's lives. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
The New Yorker
"By meticulously tracing the provenance of these objects [in the house], she re-creates the life they once furnished."
Brooke Allen, The Atlantic Monthly
"A House Unlocked is a very personal book,and the personality that shines through is an attractive one: diffident, thoughtful, gentle."
The Seattle Times
"A literary high-tea for Anglophiles—a gorgeous miscellany of delectable meditations."
Library Journal (starred review)
"Lively's writing is a palimpsest of past and present on which flit scenes of England's changing mores and rituals.Highly recommended."
Kirkus Reviews
"As Lively shapes the greater social picture,she keeps it invested with a personal stake,making her world a deeply lived experience."
Book Description
In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively takes us on a journey of her familial country house in England that her grandparents bought in 1923. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change—and of the family that changed with the times. As she charts the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to life the effects of the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through portraits of the refugees who came to live with them. A fascinating, intimate social history of its times, A House Unlocked is an eloquent meditation on place and time, memory and history, and above all a tribute to the meaning of home.
About the Author
Penelope Lively is the author of over twenty books of fiction and non--fiction, including the Booker Prize-winning novel Moon Tiger and the Whitbread Award-winning novel A Stitch in Time, as well as numerous children's books.Lively's awards include the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Award, the British Arts Council National Book Award, and the Carnegie Medal
House Unlocked FROM THE PUBLISHER
'I thought that I would see if the private life of a house could be made to bear witness to the public traumas of a century'. Here Penelope Lively recalls Golsoncott, the country house in Somerset her grandparents bought in 1923. Through the sometimes strange, unfamiliar articles there - the gong stand, the picnic rug, the potted meat jars and bon bon dishes - she charts the social changes and transforming moments of the twentieth century. Changing attitudes to social class, the tension between town and country, how one learns to see the world: all are examined in this eloquent, fascinating memoir.
FROM THE CRITICS
New Yorker
The British novelist Penelope Lively spent her early childhood in Egypt, but it was her school holidays at Golsoncott -- a manor house that her grandparents bought in the wilds of Somerset, in 1923 -- that shaped her life. In this slim, beguiling book, Lively describes the contents and customs of the house: its silver cupboard stocked with napkin rings; the sampler stitched by her grandmother (it featured portraits of refugee children billeted in the house during the blitz); the gong stand and the potted-meat jars. By meticulously tracing the provenance of these objects, she re-creates the life they once furnished.
Publishers Weekly
Using "the furnishings of a house as a mnemonic system," Lively (Moon Tiger) takes readers on an imaginary tour of Golsoncott, the Edwardian country house her grandparents bought in 1923, home to several generations of her family. She recalls the gong stand in the entryway (a symbol of "vanished rituals" calling the family to its meals) and her grandmother's intricately worked sampler, with its row of "skinnies" (representing evacuated children boarding at Golsoncott during WWII) just a few of the many objects that "spun a shining thread of reference" to another era and way of life. In this combination personal/social history, Lively tells of how even the layout of the rooms spoke to changes in thinking over the course of the century. Children were quartered in a nursery wing, far from the adults, not at the center of household life as they are today. Grandfather had his dressing-room separate from grandmother's bedroom; the gender divide in the early 20th century was not a "distinction" so much as a "chasm." Surrounding the house were its gardens, reflecting in their botanical variety the progress of British colonial expansion and commercial enterprise. Family photos with the names of the dogs and horses penciled in recall riding's role in country life and inspire a digression on the history of foxhunting. Despite all this, Lively unlocks more than the house and its century; the author herself is here, a product of both her corseted grandmother and the more modern eras that followed. This is a quietly intelligent, oddly soothing meditation on modernity. (Apr.) Forecast: Fans of Lively's Booker Prize and Whitbread Award-winning novels, Anglophiles, memoir readers and students of material culture will gravitate toward this. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Whitbread Award and Booker Prize-winning novelist Lively's latest book is a mixture of autobiography and social history. The house in question is Lively's ancestral home Golsoncott in Somerset, England, acquired by her grandparents in 1923. In 1995, when the house had to be disposed of, its familiar objects spoke elegiacally of a way of life that had changed in the intervening years. The figures on the embroidered sampler, for instance, recorded the effect of historical events like the Blitz, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust on the inhabitants of Golsoncott; the potted meat jars served as a mnemonic for the state of the Church; and the bon bon dish evoked a social class served by domestic servants. Lively's writing is a palimpsest of past and present on which flit scenes of England's changing mores and rituals. Add to this a narrative graced with fictional elements and felicitous prose and the result is, to borrow Lively's own phrase, "a rattling good read," as absorbing as any of her novels. Highly recommended for all libraries. Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
Lively, a British novelist, has written a memoir centered on her grandparents' country home in Somerset, England. The beautifully written personal account expands beyond the house to include the historical circumstances of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, revealing the social change occurring in the English countryside, including the presence and lives of refugees. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Kirkus Reviews
A memoir from novelist Lively (Spiderweb, 1999, etc.) in which the personal opens onto the greater social vista with the help of grace and a gimlet eye, as nearly an entire century reverberates inside an English country house. Lively's family purchased the Somerset home in 1923, and she uses its rooms and furnishings like one of "the mnemonic devices of the classical and medieval art of memory," bearing "witness to the public traumas of a century." The elements of the house can be emotive trappings as simple as a picnic rug recalling a moorland lunch or weightier signifiers of social change and historical clamor. Lively allows the past to be touched but never obscured by a sepia haze in prose that is remarkably comfortable, setting the stage as cozily as a panful of embers warming a winter bed, and rendering contrasting episodes like the Blitz all the more melancholy or horrible. She ranges freely, from the opening of the country's west by the Great Western Railway to the importance the Romantic poets and, gradually, an entire nation placed on walking, to church-touring with her grandmother ("and thus learned about iconoclasm and had a sudden startling insight into the power of prejudice and conviction and coercion"), turning from the garden as a veritable botanical marvel-ancient and compelling-to pastoral idealism, fox-hunting, and relations (or the lack thereof) between the sexes and between children and adults in Edwardian England. The best moments come when strangers arrive at the house and leave their mark as children evacuated from the Blitz, evoking the social reforms the evacuation sparked, or as political refugees from Russia, with all the baggage of simply being Russian duringthe first half of the 20th century. As Lively shapes the greater social picture, she keeps it invested with a personal stake, making her world a deeply lived experience.
Art & Photography
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