"The Half-Crown House" 1956 ASHTON, Helen
$45
ASHTON, Helen
[253] pp.
Dodd, Mead & Company
Book Club Edition
1956
8 1/2" x 5 3/4"
VG/ VG
This is a story about a house, an old (and vet ever renewed) English country manor house, and of the splendors it has seen, the births and deaths, the hard times and the good. But mostly it is the story of the vivid people who have lived there and the mark that each has left. One would build a pavilion; another would pawn all but one precious piece of silver service. One brought tapestries from Belgium, another porcelains from China or brasses from India. A queen slept here during one glorious week of pageantry. And so the past lives in this house. But it is very much the present which concerns this book. The Hornbeam family, for all their colorful history, is hard up, and the only way they can keep the old mansion house going is to open it on summer Sundays to tourists who, for the admission fee of half a crown, wander about and examine the treasures, and in so doing relive that past almost at first hand. And the reader relives it with them. It often seems to Henrietta Hornbeam a sorry fate for a proud old family, but she feels also a quiet satisfaction in sharing her heritage. And then suddenly the great house, which had seemed at times such a burden, presents a surprising and dramatic solution to the things in life which she was to learn were dearest to her heart.