The House at Tyneford: A Novel

How a refined young Viennese saves her life in 1938 when her parents insist she flee Austria, as must her soon-to-be-married older sister & her groom leave on hard-to-obtain visas for America.Elise flippantly places an ad in fractured English in the LONDON TIMES classifieds section under the only visa position she's allowed: housemaid. Then promptly gets caught up in the drama of Margot's wedding, her mother's final operatic performance, parties & peeking out the windows at the goings on in the apartments across from hers, & beginning to notice how their friends are disappearing.Weeks later she receives a response which she can take to the visa office & get her exit permit. Now Elise's life is filled with "last times" as departure day looms while Hilde, their housekeeper & Margot sew into the seams of their clothes the family jewels.Where Elise ends up after days in transit is beside a magical bay along Britain's southern coast in its least disturbed county: Dorset. Tyneford is a 400 year old manor house complete with a maze of rooms & wings, ancestral portraits & a servants' quarters tucked properly behind the green baize door. Though none of his ancestors were aristocrats, they'd been successful merchants who'd made good in the shire society, & it was Mr. Rivers, the everso gentlemanly widower who caught sight of Elise's ad in which she'd pertly written: "I will cook your goose."She endures nights of collapsing on a hard narrow bed in her icy cell under the eaves & backbreaking days doing endless cleaning tasks which get undone if anything does not measure up to Mr. Wrexham (the butler) & Mrs. Ellsworth's (the housekeeper) standards. Then on her first afternoon off Elise discovers the village of stone cottages where generations of locals continue to fish the old way in their ancient boats, send up help to The House, raise sheep, tend kitchen gardens & bring in the hay.While Elise inherited her father's lead ear & way with words & her sister Margot got her mother's musical talent... with a cello, what they both inherited is the anti-Semitism now contaminating Vienna as Hitler's Anschluss takes over. Their father is an assimilated, atheistic author of some renown while her mother, a beloved operatic singer. They practiced Judaism only when it suited them. Now they've given away a fortune in "taxes" to get their girls out, & have little hope of their own escape.You have to relish reading about damsels from the past: Mary Stewart's opus comes to mind:  Nine Coaches Waiting (Rediscovered Classics)  is one of her best. As I have done, you've gotta love how a young woman learns a foreign language, the way a new household works & the beauty of its countryside. I loved following this spoilt & pampered baby sister still sporting puppy fat, parental snobbery & their intellectual passions.Let us not forget the wonderful Hilde, the Christian housekeeper who cared for Elise's family in Vienna & then kept in touch with the parents & writing to Margot in America, letting her know their fate.Elise's voice is both petulant & worldly, & it was her aching homesickness that brought the memories back for me: as a WWII orphan, adopted & raised by the English I'd have to suffer, at boarding school, how the girls spat & hissed, around Easter time that I was... a Jewess. A title they'd picked on after we'd read Sir Walter Scott's  Ivanhoe  in class.Natasha Solomons' novel breathes life back into the memories of those teenagers approaching adulthood who had to leave home & family in hopes of survival & work in a quota-controlled country which wasn't that keen on Jews to start with, even if one of 'em,  Disraeli: A Biography , became Queen Victoria's Prime Minister.In a brief moment of compassion England let its guard down & allowed the miracle called Kindertransport to kick in, thus saving thousands of youngsters from certain horrible death. Two emotional memoirs of that time in the Holocaust are:  The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English  & The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival .This is an epic story of how a young "Jewish princess" grew up, saw life, coped with being neither "one nor t'other" = young lady nor servant, & learnt how bigotry & injustice, courage & fear, love & loss came to pass in a time of war.For a glimpse of how one English household failed to save two young women, check out  The Remains of the Day (Special Edition) .So evocative are the descriptions & expressions of love for that little bit of England I remember from childhood summer holidays, & that house that I kept getting reverberations of du Maurier's  Rebecca .Very well done!

This is a very well-written book about family, love, and the ravages of war. Nineteen year year old Else Landau is living in Vienna, Austria with her father, a renowned author, and her mother, an acclaimed opera singer. Elise also has a married sister, Margot. All are living very comfortable, upper-middle class lives in Vienna. It is, however, 1938, and they are Jewish. Margot and her husband secure a work visa to the United States. Elise secures a domestic work visa to England, where she has obtained a position as a domestic servant. The parents also plan to leave Austria upon acquiring a visa. The objective is to get out of Austria by whatever means necessary.Elise ends up as a maid in Tyneford, a manor house located on a remote bay. Those in the manor house and the adjacent fishing village adhere to an old way of life. Times have not changed all that much in Tyneford. Then, the unexpected happens, when the heir and only son, Kit Rivers, falls in love with Elise. Coupled with the onset of war in England, everything changes and nothing will ever again be the same.This is a wonderfully told tale based upon the life circumstances in Europe of the author’s great aunt during the 1930s. It is also based upon sad but true events that actually occurred in a remote village and manor in England during and after World War II. The author successfully weaves this tapestry of events into a wonderful story. Unfortunately, the charms of the pivotal character, Elise Landau, were completely lost on me, as I did not especially like her. Still, despite this, I very much enjoyed the book overall, as it has much to recommend it.

Natasha Solomons has given us a lovely, lyrical piece of work in "The House at Tyneford. Her heroine is a 19-year-old Jewess, the daughter of wealthy Viennese parents. They send their daughter to England to become a servant... one of the few options open to Jews for escaping the madness that would soon engulf Germany and the surrounding nations.Elise Landau arrives at a magical place. Tyneford is a village perched on the rocky Dorset coast. She becomes a maid of all work in the household of Christopher Rivers, squire of the village. The characters are all somewhat familiar. We have the gruff but kindly butler, the gruff but motherly housekeeper, the impossibly snobbish titled neighbors and the handsome, flirtatious son and heir. In less capable hands, we'd have a "Reader, I married him" piece of fluff. But Solomons gives us a layered story, full of nuance, and her characters are more appealing for their familiarity.This is a love story, a story of loss, and a story about endings. It is beautiful look at English village life in that glorious time before the second world war destroyed and changed things forever. Elise must deal with a new life, completely alien to her privileged upbringing as the daughter of a prominent writer and celebrated opera singer. Her parents, Anna and Julian, remain in Vienna, waiting for visas to New York...visas that are constantly delayed. We see the situation in Vienna become more and more deadly for Jews and feel Elise's anguish at her inability to help her family. After relations between England and German deteriorate, she cannot correspond by mail and has no idea where her parents are, whether they have escaped to the fragile sanctuary of Paris, or as she imagines, are hiding in a Dutch farmhouse, some comforting equivalent to her own new situation.What sets this book apart is Solomons' wonderful use of language. Dandelions are scribbled across a meadow. Dark cormorants are 'shadow birds.' A lane of yellow primroses becomes 'a row of blondes." She has a gift for description that is charming and whimsical without ever becoming precious or self-conscious. There is real humor too, when Elise -- sick of her new life, angry at the blisters on her hands, tired of scrubbing kitchen stairs, resenting her bare attic bedroom, flees to the beach, where she has a temper tantrum, shouting out all the bad English words she can think of--but since her English is not good and she relies mostly on the dictionary and phonetics, her most profane oaths are "Testes" and "Cockles."Ultimately we are left with an unexplained mystery on our hands, which I won't reveal here, which which left me slightly unhappy at the end. Given that the rest of the book is such a delight to read, I don't want to quibble.One of the best of the "Upstairs/Downstairs" books I've ever encountered and worth every one of those five stars to lovers of the genre.The book is loosely based on a real incident. In the novel, the British army requisitions The House at Tyneford and the village surrounding it, ending not only an era, but centuries of village life and traditions. In fact, there was a town -- the tiny ghost village of Tyneham on the Dorset Coast, which featured an Elizabethan estate renowned for its architectural beauty and the beauty of its gardens. The house and the town both were taken over by the British Army after the second world war. It's new purpose was a training area for British soldiers. The house itself became a shelling target. The cottages were torn down or blasted to smithereens. Tyneham is now a no man's land, a place where soldiers learn to kill more efficiently and witnesses not permitted. Were it not for Solomons' book, most of us would never have heard of Tyneham. At least we can mourn the place and a time that we'll never see again.

Comme point de départ, deux idées intéressantes, à l'arrivée, une déception.Premier thème: L'exil. Nous sommes en 1938 à Vienne. Pour échapper à la menace hitlérienne, Elise Landau, jeune fille juive d'une famille d'artistes et intellectuels, va partir en Angleterre avec un visa de domestique.(situation qui a réellement existé dans la famille de l'auteur) La soeur d'Elise, Margot et le mari de celle-ci, savant réputé, ont des visas pour les Etats-Unis et les parents attendent également les leurs pour l'Amérique.Deuxième thème: Le manoir. Cette maison a Tyneford a vraiment existé. Elle a été réquisitionnée par l'armée pendant la guerre et avec le village n'a jamais été rendue aux propriétaires.On pouvait donc s'attendre à un roman authentique car enraciné dans l'histoire contemporaine et dans les traditions anglaises.Ms Solomons avait de quoi faire un roman élégiaque avec en toile de fond la souffrance des juifs et dans un degré moins tragique un roman nostalgique sur la disparations d'une mode de vie basée sur la relation maître - domestique. J'aurais voulu voir plus de scènes intimistes comme celle de la Pâque juive ou une famille non pratiquante, voire athée, récite sans y croire les mots ancestraux et des scènes joyeuses comme la "pèche miraculeuse" sur les côtes anglaises mêlant aristocrates, domestiques, villageois et pêcheurs dans une ambiance bon enfant -- un monde sur le point de disparaitre.Pourquoi donc tomber dans le roman sentimental sans subtilité et la médiocrité ? Face à notre Elise - Cendrillon deux soeurs tellement méchantes que cela devient risible et le dénouement tombe carrément dans l'invraisemblable.

Ce livre est une merveille - l'écriture en anglais est très riche, l'histoire passionnante. Je l'ai lu en anglais car c'est ma langue maternelle, mais avec une bonne traduction je la recommanderais aussi en français. On voyage dans le temps et dans l'espace et on est transportés dans la peau des personnages pendant une époque historique sombre où ce qui se passait à Vienne et dans la campagne profonde en Angleterre ne m'était pas très connu - à quand un bon film basé sur ce livre ?!!!Je donne 10 sur 10, avant tout pour la qualité de l'écriture, très evocatrice.

This was a good book originally published as 'The novel in the viola' - an intriguing title. Now for some unknown reason it's re-released as The House as Tyneford and poor mugs like me pre-ordered it thinking it was a new book by Natasha Solomons. Why doesn't Amazon make it clear when an old book The House at Tyneford  is re-released under a new title? Be Warned. The House at Tyneford

Beaucoup d'émotions dans ce très beau roman de Natasha Solomons; le suspens nous tient en haleine tout au long du livre; les descriptions sont justes sans surcharge et donnent à voir, comme un bon film; le style est souple, facile à lire.les touches épistolaires donnent une tonalité encore plus poignante à ce livre. Je compte lire d'autres romans de cette auteure que je viens de découvrir.

Ovvio da leggere, passaggi un po’ troppo articolato a tratti