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The Housekeeper's Tale - Sarah Wells's Story: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House
This is Sarah Wells’s story, one of the five stories that make up The Housekeeper’s Tale.
Mrs Wells was bad at accounts, bad at managing her girls, ill experienced in buying stores and economising – and this was only the opinion of her son, the writer H. G. Wells. Despite this accepted view of her housekeeping abilities, Sarah Wells managed to maintain her tenure at Uppark, West Sussex, for 13 years, having arrived in 1880. It was during this half of the nineteenth century that was the era of wealth creation for the Victorians: the railway age.
Presiding over a home where the master of the house had married the estate dairymaid, this transition from downstairs to upstairs was most unusual and risked sending the household into chaos. What followed was positively stranger than fiction, as her own son expressed in some of his published works.
Mrs Wells was bad at accounts, bad at managing her girls, ill experienced in buying stores and economising – and this was only the opinion of her son, the writer H. G. Wells. Despite this accepted view of her housekeeping abilities, Sarah Wells managed to maintain her tenure at Uppark, West Sussex, for 13 years, having arrived in 1880. It was during this half of the nineteenth century that was the era of wealth creation for the Victorians: the railway age.
Presiding over a home where the master of the house had married the estate dairymaid, this transition from downstairs to upstairs was most unusual and risked sending the household into chaos. What followed was positively stranger than fiction, as her own son expressed in some of his published works.
57 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
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About the author
Tessa Boase
9 books53 followersTessa Boase grew up in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex; studied English at Oxford and Italian in Florence; and has worked for a variety of magazines and national newspapers including The Daily Telegraph.
As a freelance journalist she's written widely on society, the environment, the food chain, and the link between all three. As a narrative non-fiction author, her interests lie in uncovering stories of invisible women, from the 19th and early 20th-centuries.
She's married with children, and lives between the Sussex coast and a farmhouse in the Sabine Hills, Italy, where she produces olive oil.
As a freelance journalist she's written widely on society, the environment, the food chain, and the link between all three. As a narrative non-fiction author, her interests lie in uncovering stories of invisible women, from the 19th and early 20th-centuries.
She's married with children, and lives between the Sussex coast and a farmhouse in the Sabine Hills, Italy, where she produces olive oil.
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