To the Manor Born

Whilst up North, during the Easter break, I had a ‘girl’s day out’ with my mum to Renishaw Hall in North Derbyshire. Edith lived there for much of her childhood as well as spending time at Woodend in Scarborough. The Sitwell family have lived at Renishaw for nearly 400 years, and it is currently owned by Alexandra Sitwell, daughter of the late Sir Reresby and Lady Sitwell.

Renishaw has one of those sweeping drives that now cuts through a golf course and as you wind up the hill, the Hall gradually reveals itself.

It wasn’t nearly as grim as I thought it would be. From photos and accounts I had expected something a bit more gothic and brooding, but it was palatably so, and the site is softened with the converted stable block with tearooms, a gift shop and museum.

The beginning of April, but still freezing and nothing visibly in bloom, but Mum and I (knowing that there was tea and cake just around the corner) battled on. The gardens were designed by Sir George Sitwell, (Edith’s father) and developed between 1886 and 1936. Statues, imposing hedges, fountains, woodland, a lake (you know the score), and also some alluring names for the different areas; the ‘Stone Tank garden’, the ‘Wilderness’ and the obligatory ‘Secret garden’.

It is a hard not to look at this place and just write Edith off as someone who came from a very priveleged background, and easy to imagine, as my Mum said, how much fun it would’ve been to grow up there. But she was remembering my upbringing, running around our garden barefoot in summer months with small tribes of siblings and friends, making dens and putting on plays. Edith and her brothers may have had all this space but not the freedom to enjoy it. And Edith certainly didn’t have the relationship with her parents that I have with mine. As the first born, it was a huge dissappointment that she was a girl (and interestingly she never inherited any of the Sitwell homes, presumably because of this fact).

‘My parents were strangers to me from the moment I was born’, she says in her autobiography ‘Taken Care of’. Sir George spent a lot of time overseeing his gardens from wooden platforms, inventing things (including a small gun to shoot wasps with) and writing books. Titles such as, ‘Lepers’ Squints’,’ Acorns as an Article of Medieval Diet’, ‘The History of the Fork’, and aptly (or perhaps I mean ironically) ‘The Errors of Modern Parents’. Although, it is also easy to reduce him to an eccentric stereotype, and on talking to Renishaw’s archivist - Christine Beevers, this is something she is trying to change by providing a more rounded picture of him.

Edith’s mother (Lady Ida) was a beautiful young socialite who married young, and perhaps inappropriately. She later had a reputation for drinking and gambling, and at one time was tried and imprisoned for fraud. Edith wasn’t conventionally attractive, was fiercely intelligent, played the piano, read poetry, but had interests and ambition that stretched far beyond being a decorative society lady. As a child she was asked- ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ And on replying ‘A genius’ she was promptly sent to bed. She desperately wanted to go to university, but was forbidden by her father, as he believed it to be ‘unwomanly’. Her education instead took place with a tutor, whilst the curvature of her spine was corrected by a metal apparatus- ‘fondly’ known as the Bastille.  

It occurred to me, whilst walking with my mother, how different Ida and Edith were from each other and how difficult their relationship must have been.

In the afternoon we went on a tour of the house; my mother held the eager party up by going AWOL to text my dad. She asked a lot of questions, stood in front of an exhibit that the guide was trying to describe, and narrowly missed tripping over an antique sofa. But (to my knowledge) she has never been imprisoned for fraud or ever had problems with drinking or gambling, and more importantly she, like Edith, is fiercely intelligent, funny, always interested and ever supportive of my crackpot schemes. I can gossip with her about clothes men and music, but I can also discuss the latest play at The Globe or have a good debate about an article in the New Scientist.

Standing next to my Mum in one of the darker hallways, with an imposing staircase, I felt lucky… and a little sad for Edith. I re-considered my attitude to the notion of being ‘Privileged’. And I began to understand why, despite being to the ‘Manor born’, she never felt at home here, and why she needed to escape to an entirely different life.