Hancox

by Charlotte Moore (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $4.20

  Hancox is the Tudor hall house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore grew up, and where she lives today. It's been in the family since her ancestor Milicent Ludlow, young, single and an orphan, took it on in 1891 and began to enlarge the house and manage the farm. Hancox tells the story of the house and the family over the following thirty years, in the long run-up to the First World War. In one sense it's a rural idyll: the arrival of the car disturbs this peaceful agrarian world, but apart from that the rhythms of the countryside go on as they had for centuries before. But all was not quite as it seemed: Milicent made a distinguished marriage but her husband harboured a secret. Milicent herself gradually succumbed to religious fanaticism. And the death of the youngest boy at Ypres devastated the family, bringing the idyll to a painful end. Using extraordinary archive material held at Hancox today, Charlotte Moore weaves an Edwardian tale of madness and jealousy, love and loss, heroism and tragedy.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.25

  Hancox is the Tudor hall house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore grew up, and where she lives today. It's a time warp where little has changed since her family took it on in 1888. They were a diverse family of doctors and soldiers, liberal politicians and educational pioneers. What they all had in common though was a habit of writing everything down and never throwing anything away. Every cupboard and every drawer is crammed with relics of family history - letters, diaries, sketchbooks, photograph albums, even old shopping lists and chequebook stubs - which together constitute a huge archive of Victorian and Edwardian family life containing fascinating stories of love and jealousy, heroism and defeat, riches and poverty as well as snapshots of the wider world beyond of Hastings, London and the empire. Told with a novelist's vigour, Hancox offers a richly detailed portrait of a vanished way of life: an English country house at the turn of the twentieth century, just before the tragedy of the First World War, with its presiding family, its servants, its farm and its local village.