Thrumpton Hall, A Memoir of Life in My Father's House by Miranda Seymour

Thrumpton Hall, A memoir of Life in My Father’s House, is at once a strange tale and an understandable story of love for a beautiful house. George Fitzroy Seymour, the author’s father, was captivated by Thrumpton Hall at a young age. Forced to move there as a child of two, George found himself living with his Uncle Charlie (Lord) Byron and Aunt Anna while his father took an international assignment. Charlie, already an owner of several estates, inherited Thrumpton Hall later in life, and was courted not only by Anna, but her mother Ismay as well. Anna, at 35, was desperate but shy; the stalemate was broken only when her older brother literally locked Charlie in the billiard room until he proposed to her. This is the foundation for George’s early years – the “adopted” child of a prosperous landowner (distantly related to the poet) and his good-hearted wife. The fact that they were childless encouraged his fantasies of one day owning the house himself.

And, after a very odd and complicated fight, he eventually did. But the house did not come without a cost.

The story of George’s early life details his infrequent interactions with others, mostly involving his attempts at being at the “right” parties and events, to meet the “right” kind of people. He cannot invite the friends he has made at boarding school to visit, because, even after he moves back to London with his parents, he has yet to tell them that Thrumpton is not his home. He is house-proud at a very young age.

The driving force in George’s life becomes the tenuous connections he makes to trace his family to royalty. In the club books he listed items like “mother sister of 10th Duke of Grafton”, or “wife daughter of the 8th Baron…”, without any real title of his own. This fact saddened him throughout his life, though the connections were a consolation.

Any book that begins with a complicated family tree page does not fare well in a summary review. Miranda Seymour, current owner of Thrumpton Hall, is a widely published British author, with novels, biographies and children’s books to her credit, and it is evident in her telling. She writes compellingly of her father’s early life with the aid of his many diaries and letters – another obsession for this eccentric English gentleman. A much-commented upon structure of the book is the fact that she writes and rewrites with her mother “looking over her shoulder”. Rosemary Scott Ellis wants to defend her dead husband’s honor, and so she picks up the manuscript throughout, and voices her concerns as we read along. In some ways, I thought this was a creative device to hear another side to the story. But in other ways I felt that the author was never really able (or willing) to be as open as she could have been if her mother weren’t reading it. The idea that her father was gay, while touched upon at times throughout the story, seemed obvious to me from the beginning, and I wondered if the author had written it after her mother died if she would have been more forthcoming. I am not actually sure she would have, since she seemed, even as she supplied irrefutable facts, to be in denial.

In truth, Thrumpton Hall was the abiding love of George’s life, and all the other people in it were merely decoration. How else would you explain the family portraits painted for the house with both Miranda and her mother required to wear wigs to cover up what George felt was their unappealing hair? Throughout the book I was expecting some sort of climactic confrontational scene, but the only thing close to this happens “off-stage”, between her mother and father, and her mother does not share this story with us. In many ways, her father was a disappointment to her, but, in the end, Miranda Seymour gives him the best gift of all – she immortalizes his beloved house.