Thrumpton Hall (book)

"Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House" is a work published in 2007 by Miranda Seymour.

The book describes, from the perspective of the alienated daughter, the life and times of the little-known George FitzRoy Seymour (1923–1994), proprietor of a declining English country estate (Thrumpton Hall) in Nottinghamshire and self-absorbed husband and father with pretensions to royalty (he is distantly related to an illegitimate offspring of Charles II). The book is primarily a memoir, judiciously narrated yet with an undertone of daughterly displeasure, while it also covers biographical details that the author knows only from having read her father’s diaries and having researched her family’s history by means of letters and other archival sources. In England the book was published as "In My Father’s House" and subtitled "Elegy for an Obsessive Love", a reference to George Seymour’s lifelong preoccupation with the grand house (originating in the sixteenth century) that he managed to inherit through his own designs, despite not being a direct issue of the previous owner, Charles Byron (a descendant of Lord Byron and uncle to George). The book, however, is anything but an elegy, even while a sustained examination of George’s obsession with the house is part of the author’s method. The "other" part of her method involves the perfect objectification of the hated father and the detailing of his deleterious decisions and actions, as viewed more than a decade after his death. His character, that of a “priggish” adolescent and gently domineering father/husband, is painted in exuberant English prose. Among his quirks are a lifelong lack of friends, a serious devotion to letter writing, an intense focus on the social graces and personal hygiene, an inability to appreciate the needs of other family members, and a tendency to aggrandize his own station in life. The chief quirk of Master George, however, is his abandonment late in life of most of his family duties, not to mention all upper-class appearances, as he takes to dressing up in leathers and touring country roads (often at night) on a motorcycle; in the process he befriends, or rather falls in love with, an illiterate “lad” or two, principally a person named Robbie whom George calls Tigger after the Winnie-the-Pooh character (to his own Christopher Robin). No one else is bemused, particularly when Robbie begins to displace others in the familial hierarchy who are slated to inherit family property. Although this aspect of the story supplies high drama, there is no shortage of human drama and tension, of mortal helplessness and hubris, in the rest of this novel book. Throughout, the voice of the author's mother provides light counterpoint to Miranda Seymour's own observations and opinions. Seymour was awarded the PEN/Ackerley Prize for the work in 2008.

External links

* [http://www.mirandaseymour.com Official homepage]
* [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/1884759.htm] Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National 1 April 2007
* [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21790 'The Knife by the Handle at Last'] Tim Parks review of "Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House" from "The New York Review of Books"
* [http://www.englishpen.org/prizes/ackerleyprize/] PEN/Ackerley Prize citation.