Nethergate

Name: Nethergate
Rating: 3.85 (366 reviews)

by Norah Lofts

First published 1973

Amazon

3.8(366)

Nethergate is a Suffolk country house whose servants and owners are already bound together by decades of loyalty, resentment and dependence when Isabella de Savigny arrives from revolutionary France. Her father has been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and the eighteen-year-old refugee expects protection from her cousin Lady Rosaleen Franklin. Instead she is treated as a poor relation, pushed towards servant status, and after being seduced and abandoned by Rosaleen’s son is forced into marriage with George Pratt, a one-armed veteran.

Lofts widens the novel beyond Isabella to the Franklin and Pratt families and to Isabella’s daughter Annabelle, following their intersecting fortunes from the eighteenth century into the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Nethergate itself becomes the fixed point in a story about rank, inheritance, domestic service, exile and the narrow economic choices available to women. By moving between masters and servants, the novel shows revolutionary and wartime upheaval entering English country-house life through refugees, soldiers, marriage and changing social expectations.