Do you even know what a Dower House is?

DOWER HOUSES IN LITERATURE 

Sometimes when I do a theme post, I think 'will anyone else care?' But - I can’t be the only person who is intrigued by the idea of Dower Houses, and the role they play in fiction. There’s something about the name that implies off-beat glamour, louche poshos, beautiful architecture, mysteries & secrets.

Roughly speaking, the Dower House is where the widow of a titled gent goes, when her son takes over the title and the big house. She will have brought her dowry (the two words are related) to the marriage, and there will have been a settlement at the time of her wedding. Her father’s lawyers and her husband’s (or her father-in-law’s) lawyers will have reached an agreement as to how she will live if widowed: an income, and a place to live, which would normally be the Dower House – a separate much smaller house on the edge of the estate is the ideal. If there is no widow, the house can be used for other purposes (smuggling, crime – we’ll be coming to that) until a claimant pops up. A grown-up son waiting to inherit might live a semi-independent life there, later to swap with his mother.

The widow will then be the Dowager Duchess as it might be – though, interesting obscure fact**, only when her son is married and there is a new duchess. The widow remains a duchess until automatically pushed out by her daughter-in-law.

** interesting to me, anyway – I wrote a book on etiquette and like to know the detailed lives of the posh people that I, on the whole, despise.

If you watched the TV series Downton Abbey, Maggie Smith’s character is the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and lives in a Dower House on the edge of the estate.

No doubt some widows did not want to move out, and felt they’d lost their place in life, but you might also expect that moving to a small elegant house, easy-to-run, with a handful of servants and plenty of time to go round interfering in local matters and giving unwanted advice – well, it must have been nice and restful? It seems to have been obligatory to make your daughter-in-law’s life a misery of course, one way or another.

There is also an idea that you could choose some of the ‘nice things’ from the big house to furnish your new home – without the trouble of having the huge hideous heirloom pieces the new owners are stuck with.

 A version of this is key to the plot of Henry James’ The Spoils of Poynton – which in turn plays a small but important role in Elizabeth Taylor’s In a A Summer Season. (Kate’s former husband loved the book: her new husband clangingly doesn’t recognize a reference to it.) In Poynton, the dower house seems to be some distance from the Big house, a maternal aunt’s bequest, not part of the main property, and her son thinks this:

It wasn’t a place like Poynton — what dower-house ever was? — but it was an awfully jolly little place.

Yeah, right, trouble coming. I will do a separate post on this book.

Meanwhile in Lissa Evans’ most recent book for adults (yes watch out - there's a children's book coming from her soon...)

The Divine Lissa Evans and her Small Bomb at Dimperley

--there is a Dower Wing (‘originally somewhat severe in aspect until the addition of a lavish High Victorian Gothic façade’) to the Tudor manor house and a tunnel between that and the kitchen. The family moves there when the building is commandeered during WW2. The tunnel is haunted (possibly explicably…) but not otherwise crime-related.

I was reminded of all this when I did a post earlier this year on

The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer

Which features an excellent Dower House – an ancestor imprisoned his wife there, and then murdered her by throwing her out of the window. Her ghost still walks nearby. But that’s just the start of it – it seems clear that certain people are hoping that the ghosts will keep people from looking too closely at the Dower House, because….

Heyho for Smugglers’ Rest

… the Heyer book sowed the seeds for this particular (and very popular) post. The Dower House is being used by smugglers to hide their cargoes, and there is even a secret underground tunnel.

Heyer was not the only author to see the possibilities.

The Dower House Mystery by Patricia Wentworth is nicely upfront about it. This is a non-Miss-Silver book, and involves a woman who can live in a Dower House for nothing, but only if she stays there for six monhs and not a moment less. It is reported to be haunted…and off we go. Someone or some thing, real or supernatural, is set on making life uncomfortable in the house.

Annabel Davis-Goff wrote three wonderful books about impoverished Irish aristocracy through the 20^th century

This Cold Country by Annabel Davis-Goff

And one is called The Dower House – that just happens to be a key setting in the book – ADG tells a great story that doesn’t involve smuggling and crime.

Another Irish Dower House features in A Brush with Death,  one of Sheila Pim’s wonderful 1950s-ish murder stories – Pim being one of my best found authors of recent years (thank you Chrissie)

More Irish murder, More Sheila Pim

In Enid Blyton’s Rockingdown Mystery

Enid Blyton, mystery vs adventure, Rock and Rill

the usual busybody children are actually staying in a Dower House for a holiday, and it is the now deserted big house where there are sinister goings on.

This from my post: the children are told

‘there’s rooms there still full of furniture, left by the last owner – my they’ll be full of moths and spiders. A strange, creepy place I wouldn’t go into, not if you paid me a thousand pounds.’

The reaction is: ‘This sounded pleasantly eerie. The three children at once made up their minds to do a bit of snooping that very day.’ I love it that the children have zero qualms about breaking into the weird old house and making free of it – neither moral qualms nor a sense of self-preservation.

The oddly-named That Stick by Charlotte M Yonge is one of her lesser-known works. There is a complicated family, where an outsider unexpectedly inherits title and House (similar to the plot of Unknown Ajax, which it does not otherwise resemble – except for the lesson that people should not judge the heir before they meet him). The widow of the previous heir lives in the Dower House -  she is one of those characters that CMY seems to admire, but not that appealing to a modern reader. Her name is Adela, which is also the first name of the widow in Spoils of Poynton, above.

There are no dower houses in Jane Austen – but I did uncover a quite unexpected, and I think relatively unknown, short story by Margaret Drabble, produced originally for a Jane Austen magazine:

The Dower House at Kellynch: a Somerset Romance – by Margaret Drabble

(in Persuasions Issue 15 1993)

It has a contemporary setting, with familiar names:   

Bill Elliot has let out the big house, Kellynch, and is ‘now camping out in the Dower House’. Narrator Emma Watson - who gets out the baronetage to find out about the Elliots of Kellynch Hall - says:

‘I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Pink peeling walls, grey-yellow lichen-encrusted stone, single white roses, white doves.’

[published in collection called A day in the life of a smiling woman 1993]

There’s a GA detective story featuring a Dower House – The Ghost Party by Henrietta Clandon, which will have its own post soon, as will the Henry James book. Has anyone got any Dower Houses to add, or thoughts on the whole scenario?

Pictures of some rather attractive-looking real-life Dower Houses:

The 17th century Dower House in Tintinhull, Somerset | Flickr

Courtesy of photographer Angus Kirk

Byfleet Manor House (geograph 3492825) (cropped and squared up) - Dower house - Wikipedia photo by Mark Percy

Dean Dower House - Dower house - Wikipedia  By Rosser1954 Roger Griffith - Own work, Public Domain,