Jane Mulvagh read history at Cambridge and is the author of a biography of Vivienne Westwood. She lives in Yorkshire and London, and has been researching Madresfield for the last three years.
Madresfield is a scholarly, evocative and beautifully written study, in which Jane Mulvagh builds up a thrillingly vivid historical portrait ... Madresfield is a little masterpiece, as rich and rare as the house itself and all its fabulous store of treasures. -- Selina Hastings Daily Mail 20080530 Fascinating history of this very private house ... Mulvagh is a tactful tour-guide with a convincing appreciation of the periods and materials that have enriched the place ... she sets the reader at ease, and generally knows how to prick our interest ... lays out for the first time the full heartbreaking background. -- Nicholas Shakespeare Telegraph Covers 1,000 years or so of country house history, and comes crammed with eccentric earls and fanatic law-suits ... the seductions of the house itself: its lavishly ornamented chapel, its antique Book of Hours, its relics from the heady days of the Oxford Movement ... burned in Waugh's imagination for over a decade, eventually emerging to give Brideshead Revisited its setting and a fair amount of its cast and paraphernalia ... a high-class guidebook in which the human exhibits can be quite as exotic as the objets d'art. -- D J Taylor Independent on Sunday A delightful work of social history, beautifully written. Daily Express The house has its own tantalising tales to tell...Mulvagh vivdly brings to life the dramatic history of one of Britain's oldest landed families. Tatler