Another chapter reiterates the common view that the long-standing Jennens court case, which touched the Lygon family, was fictionalised by Charles Dickens as ‘Jarndyce v. Jarndyce’ in Bleak House. This is a claim vigorously challenged by recent scholarship, not least because Dickens began the novel in 1851, when the Jennens litigation had lain dormant for many years.

Mulvagh’s style is that of the breathless schoolgirl. She writes sensationally of the scandal that beset the family in the 1930s and how a house fire revealed hidden documents: ‘Out of the charred remains the firemen pulled some diaries. The complete story could now be told.’ And what do the recovered journals tell? That Lady Sibell Lygon had been on the black velvets and was shouted at by her uncle, the Duke of Westminster, the man responsible for her father’s undoing.

Similarly, Mulvagh makes a song and dance of a letter of Lady Beauchamp’s regarding her knowledge of her husband’s homosexual proclivities, discovered in ‘a locked black box’ in the Madresfield muniment room. She seems blissfully unaware that this frank and moving testimony exists in multiple copies (one for each of the children) and has been cited in more than one previous study.

The downfall of Earl Beauchamp, a champion of the Liberal cause, a family man hounded from office because of his bisexuality, is an extraordinary story. It deserves to be told accurately, so it is disappointing that Mulvagh seems more concerned to dish the news on a scandal than to get her facts straight. So, for example, she confuses Evelyn Waugh with his friend and love-rival ‘Frisky’ Baldwin and the travel writer Robert Byron with Robert Harcourt Byron, the tall, blue-eyed Australian valet who travelled with the Earl during his exile. Her most egregious mistake is the statement that Waugh did not meet Lord Beauchamp: they did, in circumstances crucial to the genesis of Brideshead.

In Great Malvern library, down the road from Madresfield, there is a book of fascinating testimonies from servants and local people about the great house. A rudimentary (and back-breaking) contraption known as the Donkey was used to clean and polish the staircases. The perspective of below-stairs life, in the style of Gosford Park, would have added another dimension that is sadly missing from this lively but flawed book.

Paula Byrne is writing a life of Lady Dorothy Lygon.

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