Hancox

by Charlotte Moore

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 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.

Genres: History, Biography

506 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 24, 2010

About the author

Charlotte Moore was born in 1959. After reading English at Oxford and History of Art at Birkbeck College, she became a teacher for twelve years. She is now a full-time writer and in 2004 Viking published her acclaimed book about autism in the family, GEORGE AND SAM. For two years she wrote a highly acclaimed column called Mind the Gap in the Guardian. She lives in Sussex with her three children.

Reviews

[Lesley Lambourne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book chronicles, in considerable detail, the life of a family through several generations. Family diaries and letters are the source of an incredibly detailed and well told history that is based around the family house called Hancox.
This is a long (460 pages of small print) and, at times, complicated read. However rarely, if ever, have I been so addicted to a non-fiction book; it has travelled with me to NZ and been read on boats and planes in the last month or so.

Just one note of caution - if possible, read the physical book (published by Penguin) rather than a Kindle version. Partly because a traditional book such as this deserves to be read in the paper format and partly because you will want to refer to the family tree and maps regularly. There is also an excellent index which helps access the little bits that you had forgotten about!

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This should have been a dream book for me - old English house, social history - but it never came together for me.

[Erica Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13001419