As with the opposite sex, there are few books you fall for and want for life, even fewer with which you can find little fault. Here is a right stunner, if it happens to be your type — a secret family history, hitherto interred by the accidents of time, across the events of which the author stumbled by luck. A drawing on the wall at home caught Josceline’s adolescent eye. It was by Burne-Jones. Other clues to her prenatal past turned up. A relative found a japanned Victorian box in, guess where, an attic. A boring soldier or two surfaced from the bog of the Boer war. Her brother produced four flat leather boxes, from which generations of family scandals and eccentrics leap out of hiding. Officers drank claret at breakfast while planning to hunt and shoot, whether game or women or foreigners. But this is no conventional glance at the cadaverous lineaments of a society long gone. In a sweetly told story of yesteryear, which Josceline Dimbleby counterpoints with a commentary on how largely by accident she was led by one discovery to the next, she always springs, at the turn of the page, a surprise.
It was the author herself (1943-) who happened upon the bulk of her find, some old tin trunk stuffed with letters and mementoes belonging to her great-grandmother May Gaskell (1853-1940), the woman in the drawing at home. From that point the plot is always thickening. ‘I love you beyond all reckoning,’ writes Burne-Jones, ‘beyond all measure, you are quite perfect . . .’ The country houses whose attics divulged the ecstasy and agony of this material — and there’s masses of it — reveal the Nineties as nicer than they were naughty, much less witty than Wilde, rather gloomier than Elgar; more modern maybe than we expect.
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