Portland Public Library

Servants' hall, a real life upstairs, downstairs romance, Margaret Powell

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Servants' hall

837146032

Margaret Powell

Thorndike large print biography

a real life upstairs, downstairs romance

A collection of accounts about life in the servants' halls of England's great houses shares the true story of under-parlourmaid Rose, who after eloping with her employer's only son was swept up in a maelstrom of gossipMargaret Powell's Below Stairs, a former kitchen maid's firsthand account of life in the great houses of England, became a sensation among readers reveling in the luxury and elegant class warfare of Downton Abbey. In Servant's Hall, another warm and funny memoir of her days as a servant, Powell tells the true story of Rose, the Wardham family maid, who shocked people upstairs and downstairs by eloping with the family's only son, Mr. Gerald. As she went from rags to riches, Rose found herself caught up in a maelstrom of gossip among her fellow servants and subject to a rebuke from the master of the house: Mr. Wardham refused ever to have contact with the young couple again. Even after the couple left Redlands, the family home, and their marriage hit on bumpy times, Powell remembers thinking, "To us in the servants' hall, it was just like a fairy tale." Once again bringing that lost world to life, Margaret Powell trains her pen and her gimlet eye on the life she lived when families like the Crawleys of Downton Abbey and the Bellamys of Upstairs, Downstairs saved their firstborn sons for marriage to only the most perfect roses of English society. Margaret Powell was a true English treasure and Servants' Hall is Powell at her best