Bless This House

by Norah Lofts

First published 1954

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4.3(532)

Merravay is built in Elizabethan Suffolk for Thomas Rowhedge, a seafarer whose wealth and royal favour allow him to create a country house intended to embody success and permanence. Instead, tragedy becomes part of the building’s first memories. From that beginning Lofts moves through a succession of owners, servants, heirs and outsiders whose stories accumulate around the house, including episodes of witchcraft, civil conflict, sexual scandal, inheritance and changing social rank.
Over roughly four hundred years, Merravay survives the English Civil War and Restoration, the rise of imperial fortunes, Victorian society and the disruptions of the modern age. The people change while recurrent families, local stories and alterations to the building preserve distorted traces of the past. The novel is less a single family chronicle than a biography of a place, showing how private lives repeatedly reinterpret a house whose full history is known only to the reader.

Historical Periods

Georgian Era1714–1830 CE Elizabethan Age1558–1603 CE Restoration1660–1685 CE Victorian Era1837–1901 CE World War I1914–1918 CE First English Civil War1642–1646 CE