Renishaw Hall:
The Story of the Sitwellsby Desmond SewardElliott and Thompson, 2015Prolific and much-honored historian Desmond Seward turns in his latest book to a small, idiosyncratic, and utterly British sub-sub-genre: the Great House history. Following in the literary footsteps of the late Duchess of Devonshire writing about Chatsworth, or Elizabeth Bowen writing about Bowen's Court, or the greatest of them all, Vita Sackville-West's Knole and the Sackvilles, Seward has written Renishaw Hall: The Story of the Sitwells, which recounts that eccentric family's long association with the opulent Derbyshire pile since 1625 and who had their collective eyes on it long before that, during the years when it was held by the Crown and only letted out to overseers.Over the generations, the Sitwells grew in wealth and power, eventually making Renishaw Hall their family seat and investing it with the weird, eccentric energies that always characterized the family. In time, as is the way with so many great houses, Renishaw seemed to take on a personality of its own – Seward's patient research in family archives has turned up many examples of Sitwells speaking of the place as if it were a 'who' instead of a 'where,' and something of this imposing ambience was also felt by many of the countless visitors who came there over the centuries. In “that extraordinary house,” actor Alec Guinness wrote, after more than one memorably disturbing evening under its roof, “with its oil lamps and creaking stairs and miles of corridors and haunted rooms, one really could imagine that there might be a baboon or two roaming around.” Osbert Sitwell referred to “the implacable essence” of the place.Osbert was one of the trio of Renishaw's most famous inhabitants. He and his brother Sacheverell and especially their sister Edith (characterized by Seward as “the Trio”) spent their summers at Renishaw, grew up amidst its gloomy splendors, and later became literary fixtures to rival Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, although as Seward rightly though acerbically points out, some aspects of that rivalry were really no contest, as in the realm of largesse:
Bloomsbury could not compete with the Sitwells where patronage was concerned. Its sole largesse was a job in the Woofs' tiny publishing firm, working their hand-operated press (a privilege available only to one or two acolytes), or a weekend in a country cottage. In contrast, a horde of writers could be invited to stay at Renishaw Hall, whose splendours would not soon be forgotten.
Seward's strongest revelation throughout Renishaw Hall is the extent to which Osbert and Edith shaped the common conception of their parents Sir George and Lady Ida. About Lady Ida, Seward writes that she “possessed a bewitching charm, enlivened by a wonderful sense of fun. If empty-headed, she inspired affection,” and about Sir George he's far more forceful: “Although he was a strange, badly damaged man, George Sitwell had been infinitely kinder and more human than any of his offspring, as well as far more intelligent.” And through generous mining of Sir George's own writings, Seward builds a rather charming portrait quite at odds with the largely vindictive impression left by his children:
The Trio's biographers all refer to Sir George as if by now his brain had atrophied, yet it remained as active as ever, and he was working on a history of the Sitwell family, although he would never finish it. However, Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse, eight short poems with a preface and a postscript, appeared in 1938 in an edition of fifty copies. Admitting that his poems are old-fashioned, in a style 'after Tennyson', he says there is 'little in them except the expression of the grudge against Time, which anyone who has been moved too quickly into his 79th year may feel.'
Sir George Sitwell is the most fascinating and well-drawn of the many vibrant characters in Renishaw Hall, and the broader currents of the times stream through these pages as well. The whole thing is gorgeously produced by Elliott and Thompson, and the reading experience it provides is at once more intimate and novelistic than any of Seward's more general-interest royal and late-medieval histories. Like the best of Great House histories, the appeals of Renishaw Hall reach beyond the gift shop and will make gripping reading even to readers who've never been any closer to a Stately Home than watching Downton Abbey every week.
