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Miranda Seymour
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Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House Kindle Edition

by Miranda Seymour (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 62 ratings
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A biography and family memoir by turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, Miranda Seymour's Thrumpton Hall is a riveting, frequently shocking, and ultimately unforgettable true story of the devastating consequences of obsessive desire and misplaced love.

"Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight." When twenty-one-year-old George Seymour wrote these words in 1944, the object of his affection was not a young woman but the beautiful country house in Nottinghamshire that he desired above all else. Miranda Seymour would later be raised at Thrumpton Hall—her upbringing far from idyllic, as life revolved around her father's odd capriciousness. The house took priority over everything, even his family—until the day when George Seymour, in his golden years, began dressing in black leather and riding powerful motorbikes around the countryside in the company of surprising friends.

For fans of Downton Abbey—the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, called it “brilliant, original, and intensely readable”—Thrumpton Hall is a poignant and memorable true story of family.

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  1. Print length
    306 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    HarperCollins e-books
  4. Publication date
    October 13, 2009
  5. File size
    4.7 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Seymour, who's written biographies, fiction and children's books, now tells a more intimate tale, the story of her father, George FitzRoy Seymour, and the home, Thrumpton Hall, that was his great passion. In this well-told family saga, Seymour begins by noting that her father enjoyed royal lineage, even if it was only to King Charles II's mistress. Thanks to George's father's career in the foreign service, George was barely two when his parents left him with childless relations at Thrumpton Hall, which became his Eden. His need for money to secure actual title to Thrumpton may have inspired his marriage to Rosemary Scott-Ellis. Daughter Miranda doesn't shy from George's less honorable moments. When she was an awkward teenager, her father didn't hesitate to tell her how fat she looked or that her hair was so ugly she should wear a wig. And as he aged, George openly indulged his passion for young men. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Beautifully written. . . . It’s also the story of her father, and not the least of its accomplishments is that it instantly catapults him into the front rank of impossible and eccentric English parents. . . . Both comic . . . and immensely touching.”

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001BANJWE
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books; Illustrated edition (October 13, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 13, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4.7 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 306 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 62 ratings

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Miranda Seymour

Miranda Seymour

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4 out of 5 stars
62 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Sharon Jensen
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
    Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2019
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    Excellent book about the life of Corrie Ten Boom before the war
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  • Walter J. Jamieson Jr.
    4.0 out of 5 stars This House Is Haunted -- by its Owner
    Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2011
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    As someone who still argues occasionally with his own parents (they've both been dead for years), I can well understand Miranda Seymour's need to vent. She does a very good job of it. And she keeps her mum, still alive, on the sidelines as a one-person Greek chorus who doubles as a sparring partner. Whether you like or sympathize with Seymour or find her annoying by the end of "Thrumpton Hall" is irrelevant. Whether or not you feel sorry for her sad, creepy father or find him merely ridiculous is irrelevant as well. You have been taken on a beautifully written tour of a time and place redolent of the 19th Century that still existed in the middle of the 20th. Stay with it. It starts out well and gets better as it goes along. Highly recommended, especially to anyone whose family life wasn't just perfect.
    7 people found this helpful
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  • John Van Wagner
    5.0 out of 5 stars Be It Ever so Haughty
    Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2011
    Great horror fiction is full of them: enormous, ancient, drafty houses filled with formidable ancestral portraits and violent memories. But Miranda Seymour, perhaps inadvertently, uncovers a new secret passageway in the age old genre so perfected by authors as divergent as Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson. In "Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House", she brings the reader, sometimes squirming and often unnerved, to a place that is real, where houses do pulsate with sinister life, and ghosts linger with malicious intent.

    From the outset the book's main character is Thrumpton Hall itself, sullen, elegant, filled with the pride of former glories and disdainful of modern life. The house is the seat of the Byron family, descended from the great poet himself, and imbued with much of his tormented, brilliant poetic soul. Family members, eccentric bit players in moldy British aristocratic circles, moved through the manse's halls through the decades of three centuries, absorbing its suffocating, engrossing demands, until the twentieth century dawned, and with it the ruthless attack of a changing economy and shifting social mores.

    It's then that the the modern story is joined, and the house launches its all out battle for survival through the soul of George Seymour, a minor leaf on the family tree who finds himself absorbed by Thrumpton Hall when he's effectively abandoned there by his parents as a five year old in the 1930s, to be cared for by a childless uncle and aunt. George moves through his childhood isolated and removed from all reality, attaching himself to the house as other children might to an affectionate nanny, nurturing a devotion to it which over the years becomes consuming, and then obsessive.

    Neither the house nor its servant are likeable; both are fussy, selfish and mercurial, insistent that their immediate needs take precedence over those of others. George Seymour's solipsistic indifference to the outside world he disdains colors his whole young life, from his avoidance of military duty in World War II to his cynical choice of a bride whose dowry enables him to keep Thrumpton Hall from outside predators. But it's when his children enter the scene, and the author relates her first hand experiences with him, that the true destructive, compulsive force of the manor comes to life.

    In the first part of the book Miranda Seymour's prose, though always elegant, assumes a documentarian tone that would interest a pure genealogical historian more than a reader of memoir. But once her own memories comes alive, her writing opens up like a beautiful Venus fly trap and lures the reader in on a much more visceral level. She relates her removal to a far wing of the house as a young girl in the fifties: "three terrors ruled life on the top floor: ghosts, fire and flood".

    Embedded in these fears were the more prosaic ones of abandonment and neglect, and a subsequent life of yearning for the warmth and reassurance of a father's love. Seymour's book is an exploration, a lament, an indictment, and a horror story all woven into one. As George Seymour moves toward senescence and open love affairs with young boys, his daughter reveals her sense of inadequacy and irrelevance in his life, and by extension that of the house itself, with heartbreaking poignancy.

    The book will haunt you, rest assured. One can only hope that by writing it Miranda Seymour has brought herself some release. But ghosts, of course, never die.
    6 people found this helpful
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  • Jenny
    3.0 out of 5 stars What is this book about, anyway?
    Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2008
    I couldn't put this book down - although not the best writing ever, the structure that combines a linear life story with present day discussions between mother and daughter is an interesting device that works well here.

    I bought the book based on the NY Times review (in fact, one of the other reviews here reads a lot like that review), expecting insights into life in an English country house in the last century, focused around one person specifically. It starts that way, but by about halfway through, it's much more about George Seymour than his house or even his relationship to his house (in the latter part of his life, the house apparently lessens in importance to him). By the end, I realized it's actually a book about Miranda Seymour, the author, and her as yet unresolved relationship with her father. A few days after finishing the book, I've decided that the book is in fact entirely about Miranda Seymour, and her as yet unresolved issues with herself.

    Reviews here and elsewhere have portrayed George Seymour as the villain, an unsympathetic character and a deplorable man. But by the author's own testament, short of a few odd episodes such as the one revolving around wigs, her father tried hard to create a close-knit family and a happy childhood for his two kids - exactly what he did not have growing up, and which in part led to his obsession with the only tangible constant in his life, Thrumpton Hall.

    I'm left with questions about the father's relationship with his own father (who barely plays in the story, and even his "beloved" mother eventually dies without fanfare), and in turn his son (a conscious choice by the author in respect of her brother). The father's older siblings are also barely mentioned; and after going to the trouble of printing a full family tree at the start of the book, very few of those relationships are explored. One does get the idea that George Seymour felt lonely and isolated - it's a key theme of the book - but at the same time, his passion for correspondence, social visits and parties is well documented, in stark contrast. Thus, I remain curious about this man's relationships beyond his daughter and wife (the latter being rather distorted through the eyes of the former).

    On this point, on a personal level, this is perhaps the most important lesson - that our tendency to become angry with loved ones over their relationships with other people is often misplaced.

    In the end, if it's supposed to be a book about Thrumpton Hall, then 2 stars, because I want to know much more. If it's supposed to be about George Seymour, then 4 stars, because I feel I now know him, even if left with several perplexing questions.

    If it's about Miranda Seymour, then 5 stars, because I think I know her quite well now - to the point that I've had enough and don't want to know any more at all. But since I think the author set out to tell a different story, I'll put it back down to 3 stars.
    19 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Clare W.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Arrived well on time in excellent condition. It is a fascinating view of a ...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Arrived well on time in excellent condition. It is a fascinating view of a member of a family in a grand house, not so very long ago at a time when long accepted attitudes were having to be modified.
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  • Bon sens
    3.0 out of 5 stars déception
    Reviewed in France on January 21, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Rien à dire sur le contenu du livre en lui-même hormis le fait que c'est exactement le même contenu que le livre dont le titre est "in my father house" du même auteur, ce qui est indiqué nul part.
    donc j'ai offert un livre que la personne avait déjà.
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  • John
    4.0 out of 5 stars enjoyable
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2020
    Verified Purchase
    Although initially hard going this book ended up being a very well written enjoyable read
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  • Albert W. Craske
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2017
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    A very well written story of an odd situation
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  • Bertha Barlow
    3.0 out of 5 stars Too personal to be published
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 25, 2011
    Verified Purchase
    The book itself was an excellent purchase, in good condition and economic price through the market place. The contents less so. The form was memoir, but it was by the daughter of the subject, and made no attempt to be objective. The tone was therefore negative and much of the time contemptuous and hostile. The relationship of the family to their house, a large stately home, and the social comment was well written, but the author should have chosen a subject she could have been more dispassionate about.

    Well written, but too personal and unbalanced to be in print.
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