A House Unlocked

While seemingly remote tragedies such as the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and the Blitz all leave their mark, closer to home the house bears witness to important changes in the domestic and social nature of the surrounding countryside and its residents. Lively's memoirs are eclectic and fascinating, whether exploring changing fashions in dress, leisure pursuits, household management and gardening, or looking at the wider implications of changes in attitudes towards social class, women's role and marriage. While photograph albums chart the pictorial history of the family, a weathered picnic rug acts as a prompt for a wider discussion on the early hiking habits of the Romantic poets in that part of the Somerset countryside, the rise in popularity of rambling generally and the advent of the Great Western Railway and with it the opening up of the West Country as a hot tourist destination.

Throughout this rich and varied book, written in her inimitable, considered style, what Penelope Lively seeks to show is that, while many of the customs, fashions and attitudes of 20th-century middle-England have changed forever, many remain, buried just beneath a thin coating of modernism... and some changes are so seismic that they are almost overlooked in the rush to honour our past. --Carey Green

Various chapters focus upon war, religion, gardening, cooking, travel and so on.

Unfortunately, I feel that this book will not find the size of audience it deserves unless Mrs. Lively could be persuaded to translate it into a television series. That would require the house in question to be in some way as Mrs. Lively remembers it, and as the house is no longer in Mrs. Lively's family, this is unlikely to be the case.

Certainly, if you enjoy Mrs. Lively's fictional eye for detail, then you will not be disappointed by this book, the stories and characters within, and the history it amiably describes.