The Edwardians

"It's an awful thing to have been born a duke, a paralysing thing"
By sally tarbox on 29 August 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
Set in Chevron, a Downton Abbey type stately home in the early part of the 20th century, this is both a rollicking good read - and a consideration of a way of life that was on its way out. A world where the aristocracy might engage in illicit love affairs but with the utmost discretion for fear of being excluded from 'society'. As clear-sighted daughter of the house, Viola sums up:

"The society you live in is composed of people who are both dissolute and prudent. They want to have their fun and they want to keep their position. ..They know only a limited number of things about themselves: that they need plenty of money show more and that they must be seen in the right places, associated with the right people....They must indulge in love affairs which sometimes are artificial, and sometimes inconveniently real. Whatever happens, the world must be served first."

The novel opens with a house party at Chevron. Among the guests is a cynical explorer, of humble birth but gaining admittance through his celebrity. In a conversation with the heir to the house, Sebastian, he warns him about the life he faces:

"You are not allowed to be a free agent. Your life has been ordained for you from the beginning... You will venerate ideas and institutions because they have remained for a long time in force...That is real atrophy of the soul."

But Sebastian adores his ancestral home; plus he is gloriously in love with a married woman. How life pans out for him and Viola as the world moves out of the Edwardian conventions into the reign of George V, makes both an entertaining and thought-provoking read. show less

Vita Sackville-West is, for better or for worse, remembered more for being the sometime paramour of Virginia Woolf than as an author in her own right. That's only fitting, perhaps, as, even though "The Edwardians" contains a few surprises and is certainly enjoyable, it's simply not as good as even mid-grade Woolf: it's the sort of novel where all the characters are a bit too aware of their own feelings and of the motivations of others and are able to express them much more clearly and eloquently than most people ever do. It's also worth noting, though, that it's different from, say, "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse." While the novel's prose does have a certain modernist freshness about it -- and there's a bit of sublimated show more homosexuality around, too -- it's more concerned with social structure and manners than with the subjective consciousnesses of its characters. At its most entertaining, it hovers somewhere between sharp social satire and juicy exposé. Sackville-West's central preoccupation seems to be whether the social expectations and customs of the highly privileged class to which she belonged could in any sense be called "real," or whether both the sense of duty and exclusion felt by her fellow aristocrats was a pernicious, paralyzing illusion. Sackville-West had, I suppose, the benefit of considerable hindsight when she wrote "The Edwardians," but she takes pains to show how the world she describes seemed like something of an anachronism even in 1906, the year in which most of the novel is set. Even so, "The Edwardians" reads like a painfully conflicted and very personal sort of book. Both the arguments put forth by the novel's characters and the author's farcical dialogues are contrasted with a great deal of genuine feeling here, in the form of our central protagonist's genuine fondness for Chevron, his family's seat, and for his semi-feudal dependents' own identification with his family and the place in which they work. "The Edwardians" is, in a sense, a novel about place and how our identities can become wrapped up in them. Sackville-West also introduces a character drawn from the rising professional class, which Woolf herself seldom did, whose staid, middle-class morality and thrifty, impersonal view of wealth effectively represents the sort of changes that were on the horizon for British society at the time. The character that the author uses to resolve many of these conflicts seemed a bit unbelievable to me: a sort of personified deus ex machina, but I still found "The Edwardians" unexpectedly insightful and revealing. It's a funny, biting, sad, and slightly tortured portrait of a world that was about to go smash. show less

The lush, extravagant lifestyle enjoyed by the upper echelons of society in the Edwardian era was portrayed perfectly in Sackville-West's novel. Hardly surprising that in 1930 it became an overnight success. The setting is Chevron, a parallel for Knole, her family estate presented to Thomas Sackville by Elizabeth I. Sebastian is the character Vita would like to have been: the son who would inherit. Viola, his intelligent, independent sister, more accurately represents Sackville-West, who was desperately disappointed that as a daughter she would not inherit Knole. The Edwardians illustrates the complicated restraints inhibiting choice for Sebastian. His love affairs are thwarted by his status: Sylvia, fun as long as they play by the show more rules; Mrs Spedding, hampered by middle-class values; and Phil, "the little model he picked up in Chelsea", who was unimpressed by his assets and title. The story ends appropriately at the end of the era, with the intimate details of the pomp and ceremony of King George V's coronation. The story paints a fabulous portrait of the elite society at the beginning of the 20th century, before the Great War, before everything changed forever.

This is an absorbing, entertaining story that provides much insight into the lifestyle restrictions of what seems like a time without limitations. Wonderful, from the opening paragraph to the last, I enjoyed every minute. show less

Flawed, Maybe; Brilliant on Many Levels, Definitely

"Oh that bloody book! I blush to think you read it," wrote Vita to Virginia Woolf, whose press, Hogarth, had published The Edwardians to surprising success. Comparing your work to Woolf's is an ideal way to torture yourself. In Vita's case, double the anguish, because they were lovers and Vita admired Woolf.

Of course, Vita faulted herself too much. In its own right, The Edwardians is quite good. It highlights many of her writing skills, skills that put most modern authors to shame. The weaknesses come in the form of a couple of didactic passages, what some may consider excessive exposition, and a predictable and less an organic ending.

However, these criticisms pale when measured against show more the many strengths and rewards of the novel. These include an insider's observation of high society at the beginning of the 20th Century, the sexual mores of the British aristocratic class, the societal shift in the run up to World War I, and, for those fascinated by VSW, additional insights into her thinking and view of life.

The story is straightforward. Young aristocratic Sebastian is coming of age and is tormented. He feels trapped in the predictable life he sees laid out for him, lord of the manor and all the obligations and constrictions his duke title entails. He is a tightly wound ball of anger and rebellion, though his expressions of rebellion remain confined within his well-off world. He revolts by having liaisons with various women, the two most important of which are Lady Roehampton, Sylvia, best and girlhood friend of his mother (who quietly is "... quite content that Sebastian should become tanned in the ray's of Sylvia's Indian summer"), and, reaching downward, the middle-class wife of a doctor, Teresa. Sybil devastates him by breaking off the affair at the insistence of her husband, for the sake of propriety. Teresa rejects him when he offends her middleclass values of faithfulness and loyalty, which befuddle and antagonize him. Finally, he seems resigned to spending his life fulfilling the role he was born to. Until, that is, he again meets Anquetil, after participating in the coronation of George V, the ceremony rendered in vivid and enlightening detail by Vita.

Anquetil and Sebastian become acquainted early in the novel. Anquetil functions as a critical observer of upper class society, which he disparages with wit and wonder, and as a catalyst to Sebastian's rebellious spirit, as well as that of Viola, Sebastian's sister. It is in this early chapter where Vita dons her lecture robes, as Anquetil launches into a long, though intriguing, disquisition on the choice before Sebastian. Everybody, not the least Sebastian and Viola, esteem the rough and ready explorer Anquetil, who is something on the order of a Shackleton. Vita, who possesses considerable powers of description, paints him as having "A startling face; pocked, moreover, by little blue freckles, where a charge of gunpower had exploded, as though an amateur tattooist had gone mad ..." His association with Anquetil further riles Sebastian. As for meek and mild Viola, by the conclusion of the novel she reveals herself, to Sebastian's astonishment, as the true rebel.

Strict distinctions divided the upper and lower classes in Victorian and Edwardian England. In the sex department, the upper class believed in exhibiting decorous behavior as an example to the lowers who otherwise might cavort in the manner of rutting animals. As for their own sexual conduct, as The Edwardians illustrates, especially Sebastian's mother planning weekend accommodations for guests at the great country house Chevron and dinner seating arrangements, the uppers regularly switched and shared partners, and (a variation on noblesse oblige, perhaps?) extended an appendage down into the lower ranks. (For a peek at the rich pornographic sub rosas activity of the periods, see, for example, the underground Victorian publication, The Pearl.) When found out by a spouse, usually through an indiscretion that created a buzz too loud to ignore, accommodation usually proved the accepted strategy. Thus, Lady Roehampton gives up Sebastian and at the insistence of her husband George leaves with him for a station in the colonies.

Teresa, the morally cinctured doctor's wife, assiduously adheres to the strict code espoused and flaunted by the upper class. Believing he has wooed her and that she has happily succumbed, her rejection of his sexual advances, made at a Chevron weekend with her husband downstairs playing bridge with the biddies, stuns him.

Vita, you may know, rebelled against most every stricture of accepted sexual and spousal behavior. She conducted numerous lesbian and straight affairs, the most famous and most scandalous with Violet Trefusis. She abhorred being addressed as Mrs. Harold Nicolson and she would burn anyone who attempted calling her such to the ground with a look. A bit of knowledge about Vita will increase your delight in reading most of the social passages in The Edwardians.

In the short introduction, Juliet Nicolson, Vita's granddaughter, focuses on the novel as one of societal change. And, indeed, you'll see this theme thread throughout the novel. The privileged, for the most part, ignored it. The class most dependent upon them lamented it. But some, especially Viola, embraced it enthusiastically.

While on the subject of social and societal upheaval and Vita and Harold's unusual life style (delineated artfully in the superb Portrait of a Marriage), Vita's main character names are very telling. Sebastian and Viola, as you probably know, are the brother and sister in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In the comedy, Viola assumes the role of lost Sebastian, dressing like him. And it is Viola in the novel ... well, that's for you to find out. Vita herself often during her affair with Violet dressed as a man, a soldier in fact, and sometimes a wounded one at that. In The Edwardians, you will find how the brother and sister deal with rebellious spirits and change fascinating.

Enough of me prattling on about VSW and The Edwardians: now it is time for you to read and enjoy it. show less

Flawed, Maybe; Brilliant on Many Levels, Definitely

"Oh that bloody book! I blush to think you read it," wrote Vita to Virginia Woolf, whose press, Hogarth, had published The Edwardians to surprising success. Comparing your work to Woolf's is an ideal way to torture yourself. In Vita's case, double the anguish, because they were lovers and Vita admired Woolf.

Of course, Vita faulted herself too much. In its own right, The Edwardians is quite good. It highlights many of her writing skills, skills that put most modern authors to shame. The weaknesses come in the form of a couple of didactic passages, what some may consider excessive exposition, and a predictable and less an organic ending.

However, these criticisms pale when measured against show more the many strengths and rewards of the novel. These include an insider's observation of high society at the beginning of the 20th Century, the sexual mores of the British aristocratic class, the societal shift in the run up to World War I, and, for those fascinated by VSW, additional insights into her thinking and view of life.

The story is straightforward. Young aristocratic Sebastian is coming of age and is tormented. He feels trapped in the predictable life he sees laid out for him, lord of the manor and all the obligations and constrictions his duke title entails. He is a tightly wound ball of anger and rebellion, though his expressions of rebellion remain confined within his well-off world. He revolts by having liaisons with various women, the two most important of which are Lady Roehampton, Sylvia, best and girlhood friend of his mother (who quietly is "... quite content that Sebastian should become tanned in the ray's of Sylvia's Indian summer"), and, reaching downward, the middle-class wife of a doctor, Teresa. Sybil devastates him by breaking off the affair at the insistence of her husband, for the sake of propriety. Teresa rejects him when he offends her middleclass values of faithfulness and loyalty, which befuddle and antagonize him. Finally, he seems resigned to spending his life fulfilling the role he was born to. Until, that is, he again meets Anquetil, after participating in the coronation of George V, the ceremony rendered in vivid and enlightening detail by Vita.

Anquetil and Sebastian become acquainted early in the novel. Anquetil functions as a critical observer of upper class society, which he disparages with wit and wonder, and as a catalyst to Sebastian's rebellious spirit, as well as that of Viola, Sebastian's sister. It is in this early chapter where Vita dons her lecture robes, as Anquetil launches into a long, though intriguing, disquisition on the choice before Sebastian. Everybody, not the least Sebastian and Viola, esteem the rough and ready explorer Anquetil, who is something on the order of a Shackleton. Vita, who possesses considerable powers of description, paints him as having "A startling face; pocked, moreover, by little blue freckles, where a charge of gunpower had exploded, as though an amateur tattooist had gone mad ..." His association with Anquetil further riles Sebastian. As for meek and mild Viola, by the conclusion of the novel she reveals herself, to Sebastian's astonishment, as the true rebel.

Strict distinctions divided the upper and lower classes in Victorian and Edwardian England. In the sex department, the upper class believed in exhibiting decorous behavior as an example to the lowers who otherwise might cavort in the manner of rutting animals. As for their own sexual conduct, as The Edwardians illustrates, especially Sebastian's mother planning weekend accommodations for guests at the great country house Chevron and dinner seating arrangements, the uppers regularly switched and shared partners, and (a variation on noblesse oblige, perhaps?) extended an appendage down into the lower ranks. (For a peek at the rich pornographic sub rosas activity of the periods, see, for example, the underground Victorian publication, The Pearl.) When found out by a spouse, usually through an indiscretion that created a buzz too loud to ignore, accommodation usually proved the accepted strategy. Thus, Lady Roehampton gives up Sebastian and at the insistence of her husband George leaves with him for a station in the colonies.

Teresa, the morally cinctured doctor's wife, assiduously adheres to the strict code espoused and flaunted by the upper class. Believing he has wooed her and that she has happily succumbed, her rejection of his sexual advances, made at a Chevron weekend with her husband downstairs playing bridge with the biddies, stuns him.

Vita, you may know, rebelled against most every stricture of accepted sexual and spousal behavior. She conducted numerous lesbian and straight affairs, the most famous and most scandalous with Violet Trefusis. She abhorred being addressed as Mrs. Harold Nicolson and she would burn anyone who attempted calling her such to the ground with a look. A bit of knowledge about Vita will increase your delight in reading most of the social passages in The Edwardians.

In the short introduction, Juliet Nicolson, Vita's granddaughter, focuses on the novel as one of societal change. And, indeed, you'll see this theme thread throughout the novel. The privileged, for the most part, ignored it. The class most dependent upon them lamented it. But some, especially Viola, embraced it enthusiastically.

While on the subject of social and societal upheaval and Vita and Harold's unusual life style (delineated artfully in the superb Portrait of a Marriage), Vita's main character names are very telling. Sebastian and Viola, as you probably know, are the brother and sister in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In the comedy, Viola assumes the role of lost Sebastian, dressing like him. And it is Viola in the novel ... well, that's for you to find out. Vita herself often during her affair with Violet dressed as a man, a soldier in fact, and sometimes a wounded one at that. In The Edwardians, you will find how the brother and sister deal with rebellious spirits and change fascinating.

Enough of me prattling on about VSW and The Edwardians: now it is time for you to read and enjoy it. show less

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 show more 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. show less

The Edwardians was written by Vita Sackville West as a sort of joke, one she kept Virginia Woolf updated on through her letters whilst writing it. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1930 it was an instant success, although was not taken very seriously by its author – and in later years she apparently disliked hearing it praised. In her superb introduction to this edition, Victoria Glendinning explains why the publication of Woolf’s Orlando – which had flattered and excited Vita – was the inspiration for The Edwardians in which Vita exploits “the lavish, feudal, traditional world of her Edwardian childhood at Knole”.

For me reading The Edwardians was doubly interesting having only read Orlando a couple of weeks ago. Chevron – show more the large, country estate in The Edwardians – is very much Knole, and there is a great feeling of autobiographical reminiscences in the novel. So many small incidents which can only have come from life – horse drawn buses, house parties, seating plans and house guest names in small slits on the outside of bedroom doors – meticulously, and knowingly organised, and the Christmas tree ceremony, the handing out of gifts to tenants children. This novel is clearly a critique of this feudal, aristocratic society into which Vita was born; there is also an acknowledgement that their charmed existence is slowly coming to an end. This is a world of privilege and duty and old world feudalism, but it is also a world of selfish hypocrisy, snobbery and class divisions.

As The Edwardians opens in 1905 Sebastian is the nineteen year old heir to the Chevron estate, following the death of his father, he is already Duke, and until he is twenty-one his widowed mother, Lucy, the Duchess carefully controls the world of Chevron and its entertainments. As the Duchess prepares for another large, weekend house party, she glances over the table seating plan, making what adjustments she feels necessary. Bedrooms are allocated with a tactfully unspoken acknowledgement of who is sleeping with whom. These aristocratic people keep one another’s secrets beautifully, allowing no breath of scandal to seep outside their closed world. Sebastian loves Chevron, yet there is much of the glittering society of which he is part that he despises. Sebastian’s sister Viola is just sixteen and already scornful of their inheritance.

At the house party is Leonard Anquetil – an explorer – whose recent celebrity like status has opened this closed society to him. One night – up on the roof of Chevron, Anquetil talks frankly to Sebastian about the traditions and inequalities of his class – and urges him to accompany him on his next adventure.

“There is another danger which you can scarcely hope to escape. It is the weight of the past. Not only will you esteem material objects because they are old — I am not superficial enough to reproach you for so harmless a weakness — but, more banefully, you will venerate ideas and institutions because they have remained for a long time in force; for so long a time as to appear to you absolute and unalterable. That is real atrophy of the soul. You inherit your code ready-made. That waxwork figure labelled Gentleman will be forever mopping and mowing at you… You will never wonder why you pursue a certain course of behaviour; you will pursue it because it is the thing to do. And the past is to blame for all this; inheritance, tradition, upbringing; your nurse, your father, your tutor, your public school, Chevron, your ancestors, all the gamut. Even should you try to break loose it will be in vain… though you may wobble in your orbit, you can never escape from it.”

Sebastian is tempted, he feels Anquetil understands him, but he also feels he can’t abandon Chevron and its traditions. Another of the party is the society beauty Lady Sylvia Roehampton – a friend of Sebastian’s mother, she casts her roving eye over the handsome young duke and sets about beginning a heady affair with him, while the whole of society whispers about them, her poor husband remains clueless. When Lady Roehampton’s husband is later made aware of their relationship he issues an ultimatum, which ultimately separates the lovers and leaves Sebastian bitter and hurt.

After his relationship with Sylvia ends, Sebastian throws himself into a cynical and soulless existence. Seeking entertainments Sebastian becomes something of a notorious young man about town. His mother wants him to marry appropriately and settle down to life at Chevron. He meets a young doctor and his wife Teresa, Teresa Spedding a silly middle-class young woman, is very impressed with his aristocratic background – Sebastian thinks he can capitalise on her fascination with aristocratic society and persuade her into an affair. However – the moralities of the middle classes – are not those of the aristocracy it would seem.

“He had tried the most fashionable society, and he had tried the middle-class, and in both his plunging spirit had got stuck in the glue of convention and hypocrisy.”

The novel ends with the coronation of George V – and the end of the Edwardian era, and also sees the return of Leonard Anquetil between expeditions. It is Anquetil who is destined to open up to both Sebastian and his modern thinking younger sister the possibilities of another world.

This novel is hugely readable and paints a fantastic portrait of a kind of lifestyle long gone now. It’s hard not to see VSW and her family in these characters, but even for those who know nothing about VSW, her family and her lovers, this is still a very good read indeed. show less