Welcome back to Romance Wanderlust, where we daydream about actual places as swoon-worthy as those in our novels. This column is pure fantasyland fun – it’s not a review or endorsement of any featured location, most of which I haven’t personally visited. This month, we are (in our heads) visiting Wentworth Woodhouse, an amazing country house (by which we mean massive incredibly giant edifice) located in Yorkshire. Many believe that Jane Austen used this house as her inspiration for Pemberley, Darcy’s estate in Pride and Prejudice.
Wentworth Woodhouse has a long and convoluted history that amounts to an epic game of Keeping Up With the Joneses For Complex Personal and Political Reasons. It’s actually two houses joined together (plus outbuildings).
The first house was built in the Baroque style, by Thomas Watson-Wentworth. Construction started in 1725. Alas, by the time the house was near completion, the Baroque style was out of fashion. So, in 1734 the Wentworth family hired Henry Flitcroft to build a whole new house in the Palladian style, which was all the rage, in front of the old house, which was so five minutes ago (they are generally referred to as a single house).
The house was inherited by Charles Watson-Wentworth, who passed it on to his sister, who married into the Fitzwilliam family. The Fitzwilliams were especially interested in the gardens. This ensured that the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse were just as lavish as its interior. It includes follies and a three-story tall mausoleum.
One of the most amazing things about the house is that to this day no one seems to agree on how many rooms there are. There are over 300, but how many exactly? And for heavens sake, how hard can it possibly be to count rooms, even a lot of rooms? I suspect that part of the problem is that different people might disagree on what counts as a “room.” The rooms in Wentworth are incredibly varied.
At its height, the house was full of servants, and there were designated rooms for things as specific as barbering and making candles. There are tiny rooms and vast ballrooms (where kids used to skate when no one was looking) and miles of hallways. At one time, the house was full of art, but much of that art has since been placed with the family in other residences and in museums.
The house suffered after WWII, when the government mandated that a large part of the estate be mined for coal. This damaged the grounds and possibly the structure of the building itself. Later the family experienced personal tragedy and financial losses that further weakened their ability to maintain the estate. After renting it out to local schools, the Fitzwilliam family finally put it up for sale in 1989. Much of the building is in poor repair. It’s estimated that repairing and restoring the house will cost around 40 million pounds.
Austen scholars love to debate whether Austen was inspired by a real house when she described Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice – and if so, which house inspired her? Many scholars believe that Wentworth Woodhouse was her model. Authors such as Janine Barchas at John Hopkins University Press make a compelling case for Wentworth, based on its appearance, its location, and the significance of the names attached to Austen’s novel and Wentworth. Another contender (which we shall visit in a later column) is Chatsworth House, which Austen directly mentions in Pride and Prejudice. Chatsworth House was featured in the 2005 film adaptation of the book.
There was news that Wentworth Woodhouse was being bought by a Hong Kong based company, but this sale fell through and a British non-profit was able to purchase the house and surrounding grounds. The group, The Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust, hopes to restore the house and grounds, and plans to continue to open the house to the public for tours and events. While this has conclusively dashed my hopes of buying it and moving there with pretty much everyone I’ve every met, it’s good news for Britain.
While you can’t buy the house, at least you can visit. Wentworth Woodhouse has a schedule of tours and events. They also have a fun fact page. Surely they will begin hosting balls soon. I’m ready! I already have a dress!
The definitive winner of The Internet today is Rikki’s Retro Reviews, which created a copy of the house on Minecraft. If you can’t visit the house in reality, you can always take the Minecraft tour on YouTube!
For an exhaustive history of the house, Wikipedia is full of details.
For a more entertaining and gossipy history that gets into the personal rivalries and the politics around the house, check out the series The Country House Revealed, which is on YouTube.
I particularly love the way the narrator, David Cruickshank, periodically looks confidingly at the camera and drops his voice to a whisper, as though he’s Davis Attenborough sneaking up on a stoat. “But this is just the stable block,” he whispers, thrilled. You don’t have to take the house by surprise, Dude. It’s not going anywhere.
Here’s the first clip. So much pretty!
Have any of our readers visited this amazing house in real life (as opposed to Minecraft)? Tell us all about it! And if you, too, had hoped to buy it after winning Powerball, we will feel your pain in the comments.
Try ‘Black Diamonds’ by Catherine Bailey – fascinating history of the house, the family and the coal industry. And of course the intriguing Kennedy connection…
Black Diamonds is a wonderful, wonderful book.
A friend studied there in the early 1980s when it was part of Sheffield Polytechnic. Saw Whistlejack when it was on loan at York Art Gallery, it is huge.
Very interesting – I didn’t know this mansion at all, and given its poor state, I don’t think it has been featured in films and miniseries, has it? Thanks, Carrie.
I’ve not been to the house, but I have been to the village back in the days when I worked as a Mystery Passenger. I hope the Wentworth Woodhouse Trust are successful and make enough money to keep the place going as apart from wanting the house to survive that area has been depressed ever since the collapse of the steel and mining industries in the eighties.
“David Attenborough sneaking up on a stoat” made me crack up! Thanks for that & another gorgeous old estate to add to my “Must Go” list
I LOVE this new feature. You are making me want to go back to London! Well, that doesn’t take much – I even wrote an entire book to justify wanting London so badly. Basically all my books are love letters to travel, so to have my two favorite things – romances and travel – here in this feature – thank you!!!
I’m a little bit (a lot?) of an art museum junkie, and Whistlejacket was my favorite part of the National Gallery. It was breathtaking – the painting is so unexpectedly huge. (A frequent occurrence in romancelandia, unexpected size, and also in art museums). I’m in my kitchen, and thinking that in real life the painting was the size of the kitchen wall in front of me.
The tan/gold backqround was so modern in its feel – almost ten feet high, and hung on the wall next to all the lovely but typical landscapes and elaborately realized oil paintings. By its perfect simplicity, this horse commands the room it hangs in. Stubbs did a couple other horse paintings with “blank” or unfinished backgrounds (but not truly unfinished – the shadows are completed on the plain backqround, so it’s obviously what was intended, and the “unfinished” is inaccurate description).
Since the National Gallery is free, in London you can pop in and see it and go out right past the Impressionists and do it all in as little as 30 minutes (I had kids with me, so that was pretty much it – but it was worth it because Whistlejacket is such a breathtaking painting and they do still remember ‘the big horse’ and ‘the sunflowers’ by Van Gogh.) The museum faces Trafalgar Square, so I know every Regency-loving SB who goes to London is going to the area – and that makes it easy enough to gaze upon this amazing horse.
And because I got started and it’s late and I can’t stop – a plug for Apsley House, if you’re doing London and have a little extra time after the big can’t miss stuff. You can dance yourself through Wellington’s ballroom and the pretend fantasy factor is SO HIGH. Plus a great audio guide with the current Duke narrating some parts, AND a naked nine-foot tall Napoleon statue that Wellington took as spoils, adorning the stairwell. Sure, not for everyone – it wasn’t really my husband’s thing, poor man – but I loved it and I’m guessing Carrie S and a bunch of SB’s would be into Apsley House too.
I wish I could design a SB fantasy trip … London, British countryside, maybe quick run to Scotland, then Waterloo. Dance lessons. Men in tight pants. Trying on millinery and gloves. A bit of archery. Men in tight pants rowing us around in small boats. Somewhere we’d have an optional side trip to Viking strongholds and find a really nice white fur to reenact classy 1980s book covers.
Thanks again for the great read.
@ Anna Richland. I’d Sign up for that tour! Actually I’ve done some of those things, including see Apsley House, which is wonderful!, but have not seen Waterloo or been rowed around in a small boat by a man in tight pants so I’m in. I did see Culloden battlefield in Scotland – boy was that depressing but educational. Have not seen Wentworth Woodhouse and if I ever get back to England will definitely try to – it sounds amazing.
@Anna Richland – I have tour building skills. Like, for real. I used to run study tours for a living, in the UK no less. Let’s DO THIS THING. Smart B*tches, Assemble! Who’s in? 😀 😀 😀
Omg I don’t know how I’ll get there, but I need to go to one of the balls. I, too, have a dress ready.
So hilarious that there’s a Minecraft tour! I hear some folks rolling in graves, for sure. Great piece!