It’s almost here, Anglophiles! Season 3 of Downton Abbey begins on Sunday January 6!
If you want to enhance your Downton experience or find a fix for those days when the suspense around Matthew and Lady Mary’s romance just isn’t enough, you might enjoy some of these titles.
Edwardian Cooking: 80 recipes inspired by Downton Abbey’s elegant meals. Feast like it’s 1913.
Manor House – Reality television as done by PBS. One family gets to be the aristocrats. Everyone else is a servant. If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy others in this series like Colonial House, Frontier House and 1940s House.
Gosford Park – Surely you’ve seen this dazzling murder mystery, written by Julian Fellowes and starring Maggie Smith?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence – Censored by the US government and not (legally) available here in all its naughty glory until 1959 (Wikipedia has a great run down on the legal fight to overturn the government’s censorship of the text, including the tantalizing threat of one US senator to read the steamy portions of the book aloud on the Senate floor), DH Lawrence‘s tale of class conflict and smoldering sexuality in the post-World War One Britain is a classic.
Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones This recent novel from acclaimed British writer Sadie Jones mixes dry wit and dark humour.
Lady Almina and the real Downton Abbey: the lost legacy of Highclere Castle by the Countess of Carnarvon Take a look at the history of the majestic house used for the fictional Downton Abbey.
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett – Grand in size and scope, this 1000+ page novel chronicles the upheaval wrought by the First World War across Europe and the Americas.
The Time Machine by HG Wells I put this book on the list in a nod to the Dowager Countess. After electric lighting and a telephone are installed at Downton, the Dowager exasperatingly says “Sometimes I feel as if I were living in an HG Wells novel.”
The American Heiress by Daisy Godwin A wealthy American named Cora marries into the British aristocracy near the turn of the 20th century. Sound familiar?
-Matthew