The Disinherited: A Story of Family, Love and Betrayal. By Robert Sackville-West. Bloomsbury; 308 pages; £20. To be published in America in January 2015. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST, seventh Lord Sackville, lives at Knole in Kent, a Tudor palace so vast that it struck Virginia Woolf as more a town than a house. His family have lived there for 400 years, and in his earlier book, “Inheritance” (2010), he described them carrying their splendid burden down the generations, swerving past their younger sons, widows and daughters, staggering under debts and dilapidations, until at last, in 1946, they collapsed into the arms of the National Trust. A theme of that book was the law of primogeniture, and the bitterness of the disinherited. Here, in “The Disinherited”, he follows the same theme down a branch of the family that was only sketched in there—a bastard branch of “illegitimate” Sackvilles.These were the children of Pepita, a celebrated Spanish dancer who, in 1852, captivated a young British diplomat, Lionel, later the second Lord Sackville. Pepita had a husband already, although they were separated...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1jV6iJi
No comments:
Post a Comment