A House Unlocked - Hardcover

Lively, Penelope

3.66

289 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670899542 ISBN 13: 9780670899548

Publisher: Viking, 2001

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'I thought that I would see if the private life of a house could be made to bear witness to the public traumas of a century'. Here Penelope Lively recalls Golsoncott, the country house in Somerset her grandparents bought in 1923. Through the sometimes strange, unfamiliar articles there - the gong stand, the picnic rug, the potted meat jars and bon bon dishes - she charts the social changes and transforming moments of the twentieth century. Changing attitudes to social class, the tension between town and country, how one learns to see the world: all are examined in this eloquent, fascinating memoir.

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Review:

Penelope Lively has turned her considerable literary talent to non-fiction with A House Unlocked, a marvellous, meandering collection of memories inspired by Golsoncott, the Somerset country home occupied by her family for the greater part of the last century. By walking around the rooms of the house (in her mind) and looking at fondly remembered objects and furniture, she recalls the events, customs and people that together paint a slowly shifting picture of English country life in the 20th century. It is at once personal and social--a diary of the house and its occupants, and a memoir of the historical landscape.

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

Review:

The Booker-winning novelist Penelope Lively spent much of her childhood in Egypt, but this second installment of her memoirs concentrates on recollecting time spent in her family's country house in Somerset. By taking us back to its original purchase by her grandparents in 1923, she makes the scope of the book almost a survey of the century - and writes with a view to detailing socio-historical changes of wider resonance, rather than to producing straight autobiography or family history. The result is an interestingly unusual mixture, moving almost seamlessly from reflections on objects in the house to accounts of eccentric uncles to the Romantics' 'discovery' of the Quantocks. And from the stays in the house of various refugees (including those from Soviet Russia and London during the Blitz) to changing attitudes concerning childrearing in the 1950s. It's the quality of the writing and Lively's eye for detail that are most engaging in this distinguished and least self-obsessed of memoirs.

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