The Edwardians

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West is a delicious and decadent look into the last years of the Edwardian Age. VSW was the perfect author to write about this subject since she was raised in the stately Knole, the ancestral seat of the Sackville-Wests and the undisguised model for Chevron.

VSW's hero is Sebastian, master of Chevron. He lives in the mansion with his twin sister Viola and his widowed mother, the current Duchess. In the course of the book Sebastian has one grand love affair with his mother's best friend Lady Roehamptom, attempts the seduction of a starstruck doctor's wife, and flings about London with a free-spirited Bloomsbury artist's model. If Sebastian's affairs illustrate one thing, it is that the rich can do just about anything they want and society happily will look the other way. Only blatant public display will bring any kind of disapproval. So, it is no problem if Sebastian and Lady Roehampton copulate like bunnies as long as no one "officially" catches them. But when Lord Roehampton receives a pack of incriminating letters he is compelled to react and ends his wife's current affair by dragging her out of the country. (Incidentally, Sebastian's mother completely approves of Sebastian's liaison with a woman 21 year older than he. A married older woman who will make no demands on the 19 year old heir is the perfect tutor in the art of love!)

After being crushed by Lady Roehampton's departure, Sebastian tries to seduce the young wife of a London doctor. She is flattered by the attentions of the handsome duke and almost succumbs to his wishes in the silver Queen's Room at Chevron. Only the fear of what "society would say" prevents her from making love with Sebastian on Queen Elizabeth's bed. And she was right. Society would have kicked her to the curb. No discreet withdrawal to the country would have been possible for a middle-class woman.

Phil, the lovely artist's model, didn't give a damn about society and took Sebastian to her bed for the joy of it. When she breaks it off, it is because she said it was time for them to move in; she had no desire to be a part of his circle and he really could not see her as mistress of Chevron, for all of his protests of love.

VSW had great fun writing thinly disguised portraits of the regular visitors to Knole. According to Glendenning's introduction, VSW anticipated her readers trying to attach real names to the characters and making her lots of money in the process. VSW was absolutely right.

The Edwardians has a different fascination for the 21st century reader. Rather than caring about whether or not Lady Roehampton was really Lady Westmoreland, the interest for me was in the dying Edwardian era itself. For example, VSW describes the hours spent by the grand ladies in their dressing room. There were morning dresses and then afternoon dresses or riding clothes or walking clothes. Then there was the all-important toilette for the evening meal with the proper undergarments, tightly laced corset, silk stockings, petticoat, hair, discreet makeup, and jewels. Since it took over an hour to dress for dinner, the statement "We will not dress for dinner tonight" was a genuine boon. What a waste of a woman's time! No wonder they were obsessed by clothes since these beauties were judged by their garments, not their brains.

And then there is the Chevron estate and the grand occasions within its walls. Here is the real core of my interest. The Christmas party for the estate children; the shooting season; the servants' work schedule; the miles of downstairs corridors; the silver furniture in the Queen's Bedroom; the deer in the park; the meals!. VSW is writing about the home she loves and of a time not long dead. This is a final salute.

This is the eyewitness account of a grand house at the time of Downton Abbey. Read it and enjoy a look into period the world will not see again. ( )

Chronicling two years in the life of upper crust English society in the first decade of the 20th Century, the novel's principal protagonist is Sebastian, a young duke and heir to the grand estate of Chevron. His widowed mother Lucy's purpose in life is to throw lavish parties for her aristocratic friends. During one such party, she invites an unusual guest, the famous adventurer Leonard Anquetil, recently returned from an Arctic expedition. Anquetil takes a great liking to the young man, and asks Sebastian to accompany him on his next expedition, which offer Sebastian of course refuses, but all the same, the explorer has opened up a world of different possibilities for the nineteen-year old Oxford student. When Sebastian takes up an affair with his mother's best friend, Lady Roehampton, no one finds this unusual, least of all Lucy, who believes he's chosen his first paramour well. Sylvia Roehampton is celebrated as the greatest beauty in London, and her exquisite features have been immortalized by John Singer Sargent and other famous painters of the age. But as he flits between Chevron to London and from party to concert to other mistresses, Sebastian can't find satisfaction, and has not forgotten Anquetil and his offer. Sackville-West knew the world she described in this novel intimately, and wrote the story as a criticism of the lifestyle of the Edwardian aristocracy, amid which she spent her own cosseted childhood. I was especially pleased with my timing for this book, being a fan of Downton Abbey which similarly describes the lives of the residents of a grand English estate and which I've been watching every week with rapt attention. Because of this, I was able to vividly imagine the world and people discussed in the novel, which greatly increased my appreciation for it. It was a pleasant read, though it offered little surprises, perhaps because as a classic it must have influenced many other novels since it's publication in the 1930s. All the same, wholeheartedly recommended. The audiobook is narrated by the excellent Carol Boyd. ( )

If you're looking for some insights into aristocratic Edwardian society, this is the book for you. Sebastian, a young duke and owner of a familial estate named Chevron, seems unhappy with his lot in life. Ah, the exhausting boredom of duty! Sebastian seems to want something more than the salons, fox hunts, coming-out balls and nights at the opera can offer--but he isn't really sure what that something more is. He begins to search for it through a series of affairs, telling us later that only four of the women he conquered ever really changed him in any way. The first, the renowned but much older beauty Lady Roehampton, taught him that people of his class in society will always put their position before everything else, even love. The second, a married doctor's wife who first encouraged but then spurned his advances, proved top him that middle class women had the same dull concerns with position. The third, the groundskeeper's daughter, was a lovely girl, but a girl who sucked her teeth could never be accepted by his peers. The fourth, a model, attracted him for her bohemian lifestyle, but in the end, she found Sebastian far too dull. Before long, Sebastian realizes that he has settled into exactly the kind of routine that the adventurer Angetil had predicted and warned him about. And he is trapped, with no means of escape.

Sackville-West, who certainly knew the ins and outs of high society, delivers a subtle but scathing critique of her own kind. While I can't say that I was blown away by The Edwardians, it was an interesting portrait of the duller side of the aritsocracy, with even a little sympathy for their lot thrown in. ( )

This is unmistakably and enjoyably a novel, not a sermon, an essay or an exposition. But it's a novel so strongly about a theme, that it's impossible to discuss it without dwelling on that theme. The book hammers its theme plainly and repeatedly throughout the book - in that respect, it is certainly not subtle. But the complexity of that theme, and (strangely, I think) its relevance to most of us, are somehow interesting enough to make that lack of subtlety unimportant. The book is about its title - the people of that glittering period just before the Great War. It explores the strange relationship many of us have with our idea of English high society of that time: a half-guilty attraction to its lavish decadence; a distaste for the outrageous inequality of its class system; a secret love for its beauty and apparent solidity; a fascination with the sense of belonging, rightness, natural order of things that the incredibly rich felt about their place in society; and most of all, that sense of underlying fragility, impending doom, the looming shadow of the War to come. It's a conflicted discomfiture we have toward the period (I speak for myself mainly, but suspect many share it): a shameful love and nostalgia, combined with a rather smug disdain for its arrogance and supreme unfairness.

The young duke, awakened to the creaking weight of his position in an outdated society, becomes aware of society's flaws: its false morality, its stifling traditions, its heavy yet unnecessary responsibilities and repetitive pleasures. He begins to react to some things as we might in his place - I think of the little scene where Sebastian (the young duke) has just popped in to chat kindly to an old retainer of his, and told him he would be raising his pay to an extra five shillings a week. The old retainer is profusely pleased and grateful. "{Sebastian} felt, rather, that it was he who should thank the old man for rising at five o'clock every morning and for walking three miles, that the bath should be hot by eight and the fires fed throughout the day." Unfortunately, that quote taken out of context seems dreadfully heavy-handed and preachy - please believe that in context, it is not.

It's essentially a story about a young man exploring the world as it is for him, thinking about it, rebelling against and accepting it, sometimes playing with it recklessly, sometimes submitting to its tyranny. It's about a young man of great rank and fortune, intelligent and questioning, living within a society that is doomed, and is beginning to suspect that that doom is approaching.

It is also not merely about Sebastian - in fact the book is broken into seven parts, all except the first are named after the other characters who profoundly influence him, and are influenced by him. The first part is named after Chevron, the Duke's nostalgically beautiful country seat. The others are Anquetil, a free-thinking working-class explorer who first awakens Sebastian to these rebellious ideas; Sylvia, Sebastian's first lover, an older woman of rank; and Teresa, a middle-class doctor's wife fascinated by high society. (Several of the seven parts are headed by the same names.) We see things through the eyes of these characters too, and they tend to mirror and explore our own reactions to things which only seem natural to Sebastian.

In some ways, this book is not unlike Forster’s A Room with a View - set in the same period but within a different class of society, it explores the same themes of awakening and rebellion among the young and privileged in that paradoxical decade before WW1.

I have to admit that I was nervous going into the reading of this novel. I was expecting that Vita Sackville-West’s writing style was going to be very modernist and hard to read. But I was pleasantly surprised, as I usually am when I expect to dislike something.

The Edwardians is set in 1905 and 1906 (and then in 1910), and features Sebastian, a duke and owner of an estate called Chevron. His family is of the elite, and he rubs elbows with the cream of society, among whom are Lady Roehampton, a matron with whom he has an affair, and an adventurer named Leonard Anquetil, and Sebastian’s mother Lucy and his sister Viola, who strains against the parameters that society has set for her life. Despite his wealth and the privileges that come with it, however, Sebastian feels trapped, and he finds himself faced with a heavy decision to make.

The plot isn’t very original or groundbreaking, but what it lacks is more than made up for in the characters that populate this book. Vita Sackville-West’s novel gives it’s reader a little taste of upper-class, aristocratic society in the early 20th century—and she reveals the good and the bad of this kind of world. All of her characters, even the superficial and shallow ones, are well drawn, and probably very true to life considering that Vita Sackville-West knew this world very well. Sebastian and Viola seem to experiment with everything that is deviant from the world into which they were born; but it’s all a part of the growing-up process for them.

Vita Sackville’s message about the shallowness of the trappings of the upper-class lifestyle in Edwardian England also comes across strongly; sometimes too strongly. Also, the decision that Sebastian makes at the end seems a little too rushed (I understand why he makes that decision, but it seems too impetuous). As I’ve said, though, Sackville-West’s writing moves very smoothly, and her characters are very real and believable. Sackville-West was very perceptive about the world of which she wrote, and it shows through in this novel. ( )