Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

Overview

Julian Fellowes, creator of the Emmy-Award winning TV series Downton Abbey, established himself as an irresistible storyteller and a deliciously witty chronicler of modern manners in his first novel, Snobs, a wickedly astute portrait of the intersecting worlds of aristocrats and actors.

"The English, of all classes as it happens, are addicted to exclusivity. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them."

The best comedies of manners are often deceptively simple, seamlessly blending social critique with character and story. In his superbly observed first novel, Julian Fellowes, winner of an Academy Award for his original screenplay of Gosford Park, brings us an insider's look at a contemporary England that is still not as classless as is popularly supposed.

Edith Lavery, an English blonde with large eyes and nice manners, is the daughter of a moderately successful accountant and his social-climbing wife. While visiting his parents' stately home as a paying guest, Edith meets Charles, Earl of Broughton, and heir to the Marquess of Uckfield, who runs the family estates in East Sussex and Norfolk. To the gossip columns he is one of the most eligible young aristocrats around.

When he proposes. Edith accepts. But is she really in love with Charles? Or with his title, his position, and all that goes with it?

One inescapable part of life at Broughton Hall is Charles's mother, the shrewd Lady Uckfield, known to her friends as "Googie" and described by the narrator---an actor who moves comfortably among the upper classes while chronicling their foibles---"as the most socially expert individual I have ever known at all well. She combined a watchmaker's eye for detail with a madam's knowledge of the world." Lady Uckfield is convinced that Edith is more interested in becoming a countess than in being a good wife to her son. And when a television company, complete with a gorgeous leading man, descends on Broughton Hall to film a period drama, "Googie's" worst fears seem fully justified.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429904186
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/24/2006
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	115,688
File size:	484 KB

About the Author

Julian Fellowes is the Emmy Award-winning writer and creator of Downton Abbey and the winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Gosford Park. He also wrote the screenplays for Vanity Fair and The Young Victoria.He is the bestselling author of Snobs and Past Imperfect. His other works include The Curious Adventure of the Abandoned Toys and the book for the Disney stage musical of Mary Poppins.

As an actor, his roles include Lord Kilwillie in the BBC Television series Monarch of Glen and the 2nd Duke of Richmond in Aristocrats, as well as appearances in the films Shadowlands, Damage,and Tomorrow Never Dies.

He lives in London and Dorset, England.

Julian Fellowes is the Emmy Award-winning writer and creator of Downton Abbey and the winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Gosford Park. He also wrote the screenplays for Vanity Fair and The Young Victoria. He is the bestselling author of Snobs and Past Imperfect. His other works include The Curious Adventure of the Abandoned Toys and the book for the Disney stage musical of Mary Poppins.

As an actor, his roles include Lord Kilwillie in the BBC Television series Monarch of Glen and the 2nd Duke of Richmond in Aristocrats, as well as appearances in the films Shadowlands, Damage, and Tomorrow Never Dies.

He lives in London and Dorset, England.

Reading Group Guide

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julian Fellowes is a English writer, actor, and film director who was born in Egypt and educated at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire. He went on to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, and the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
As an actor, his roles include Lord Kilwillie in the BBC Television series Monarch of the Glen and the 2nd Duke of Richmond in Aristocrats, as well as appearances in the films Shadowlands, Damage, and Tomorrow Never Dies.
As a screenwriter, his first feature film was Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, which won awards for the best original screenplay from the National Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, the Writers Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has since worked on the new film version of Vanity Fair starring Reese Witherspoon, as well as adapting Piccadilly Jim by P. G. Wodehouse.
He made his debut as a film director with Separate Lies, starring Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, and Rupert Everettt, for which he also write the script; and he wrote the book for the acclaimed Cameron Mackintosh/Walt Disney stage musical of Mary Poppins, which opened in London at the end of 2004.
In 1990 Julian married Emma Kitchener. They have a son called Peregrine, a dachshund called Humbug, and a border collie called Meg; and divide their time between London and Dorset.
Snobs is his first novel.

JULIAN FELLOWES ON CLASS

Q: Your own background is not so different from some of the aristocrats you write about in Snobs. Is this book an indictment of the British upper class? Affectionate teasing? A little bit of both?
A: My background is not quite as lustrous as it has been painted by some of the media. I mean, in one newspaper I was given a childhood in a Scottish castle with 19 servants (why 19?). But I grew up as part of a junior branch since my grandfather was a younger son. And so, although I do belong to one of those families and my name is in Burke's Landed Gentry and all that kind of thing, it's in a very minor capacity. I think that was what gave me a unique perspective as an observer.

When I was 18 or 19, the London debutante season was still very much going on. You'll hardly credit this, but there was a chap called Peter Townend who really ran the season. In order to find escorts for the debs, he would go through Burke's Peerage and Burke's Landed Gentry and take the names out of young men who were the right age and invite them for a drink. If you passed this test, and were deemed "safe in taxis," you were put on a list and given to the mothers of these girls to be invited to the various balls and cocktail parties. So you spent a lot of time going and staying with complete strangers in the country to attend the dances of girls you hardly knew. I was on that list. I was what was then called a "Debs Delight," but I was simply "making up numbers." I wasn't good looking, I wasn't a great heir, I didn't have a title. So I was there, but no one noticed me. I was the one who had the bedroom next to the nursery with a lumpy bed, and what my mother used to called "starvation corner" at the table. And I think it gave me a much better kind of viewpoint. There is a famous moment when someone went to the Comtesse Greffulhe, who is the original of Marcel Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes in his great novel, and they said to her, "What was it like having Proust at your parties? That must have been incredible!" And the Comtesse replied, "Que j'ai jamais su! (If only I'd known)." And of course, although he was in that society (not that I'm comparing myself to Proust), and attending their gatherings and strolling among them, because nobody thought he was of the slightest importance, nobody adjusted their behavior for him.

As for whether my novel is an indictment of that world, I have come to a conclusion in my late middle age: I'm not convinced anymore that there is a kind of life that makes you happier than any other. I mean, I know - of course - there are lives that are happier than other lives, but I think you're just as likely to come upon them among coal miners or middle-class business men or people living in the suburbs or the very rich and great aristocrats. I think it's a cliché to make out that everyone with money and success and birth is unhappy. I don't think they are, I think there are lots of them that are very happy. But it's also a cliché to suggest that these things make you happy. And I hope that in the novel (and in life too) I take a fairly unprejudiced view of all of them. I do poke fun at them and there are sort of observations and customs and habits that are rather amusing to the rest of society, but I don't think you hate any of the characters at the end, not Lady Uckfield nor poor Mrs. Lavery (the greatest "snob" of all of them, I think) nor any of them, really. I just hope that I paint a picture of a group of people who, in the last analysis, are trying to do their best like all the rest of us are.


Q: It's striking that both Gosford Park and Snobs explore the world and manners of different classes. Do you think this is a particularly English preoccupation?
A: Class does interest me; I won't run away from that. I can never really decide whether class is a kind of honorable thing: that you are brought up with these traditions - whether you are working class or aristocratic or whatever - and it's your job to keep all this stuff going and make sure people don't forget. Or is it a sort of terrible practical joke that's being practiced on 98% of the world? Telling them that they're not good enough. That, from the moment they're born, there's this other group of people who know more than they will ever know and who have standards they can never aspire to and who are more cultured and elegant than they will ever be. In the end, I sort of fall in-between those two really. It is odd that you take a baby, and you place them in this group, and you bring them up in a certain way with a certain vocabulary and prejudices and manners, and after that, they are indelibly stamped from then on. But on the other hand, isn't some variant of this happening in every civilization on earth?

Obviously, it's more obvious in Europe than it is in America. I mean, where I do think America has achieved something that is very enviable is that here you have a very strongly entrenched hereditary upper-class. People think you don't, but you do. Where else in the Western world could you have two generations of the same family being president? This would be quite impossible with the role of prime minister in England as, to us, it would smack uncomfortably of privilege. Added to which, you have enormous inherited fortunes here, enough to launch ten dukedoms. But at the same time, you have self-made men and women who have come up in one generation. And they live together - the old money and the new - in a very un-jostling way which doesn't seem to create any difficulty. They mingle freely and contentedly. This, of course, was Napoleon's vision, his dream - to create an aristocracy in France which was a mixture of old families with old traditions, keeping things going, and new blood and new high achievers and that they would mix on equal terms. I can't think of any country, other than America, that has truly managed that.

Editorial Reviews

Like a visit of an English country estate: breezy, beautiful, and charming.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] guilty pleasure of a novel [that] seems authentic down to the wallpaper and the Wellingtons. Hilarious…sharp, entertaining, and unforgiving.” —Anna Quindlen

“Snobs, by Julian Fellowes, is an hilariously snobbish novel about hilariously snobbish people involved in a society scandal. Froth at its best. His writing is as stylish as his story. Mr. Fellowes knows his turf well.” —Dominick Dunne

“I couldn't put Snobs down: Who could resist a great story of a beautiful, ambitious girl on her climb to the turreted top of the castle-hopping set? As witty as he is smart, Julian Fellowes is the Oscar-winning, Oscar Wilde of the minute.” —Plum Sykes

“Julian Fellowes's witty, wise depiction of the lives and lunacies of upper-class English life is just my cup of tea....” —Jane Stanton Hitchcock

“Snobs is everything you would hope for from the writer of Gosford Park. A delicious thoroughbred delight, a guilty treat that is awake to every maddening and appallingly attractive nuance of English social life. The novel somehow contrives to be moral without being preachy or losing for a minute its gracefully shameless delight in the well bred and their satellites. A kind of Louis Auchincloss for our times, Julian Fellowes has written a book that is destined to grace all the bedside tables of all the better houses in the land.” —Stephen Fry

“This is the kind of book Edith Wharton would have written if she were around today.” —Arnold Scaasi

“Snobs is an insightful, funny satire of English upper-crust country life in the tradition of Mitford or Waugh....The best chick-lit book of the season was written by a man.” —The Globe and Mail

“Sparklingly rompish...As long as this world does still exist, Fellowes is a delectable guide to its absurdities.” —Sunday Times (London)

“Illustrated with some cherishably nasty, Gosford Park—style scenes of aristocratic point-scoring, and far more illuminating than a copy of Correct Form...one of those books one imagines being sent up to Balmoral...where it will be proclaimed divinely funny and quite amazingly true to life.” —The Guardian

“Deliciously waspish satire...Snobs is terrific entertainment, deepened by the sad ache of truth.” —Literary Review

“Fellowes's attractive, faintly cynical voice has overtones of Trollope, Waugh, and Mitford.” —The Independent

“A delicious comedy of manners on the nuances of English social life, which raises laughter and an occasional wince of recognition.” —Daily Mail

“Provocative, titillating, and seductive...Julian Fellowes tells this anachronistic morality tale with such wit, verve, elegance, and schadenfreude that it never loses momentum.” —The Spectator

“Fellowes doesn't try to hide his love of the funny, sealed, above-stairs world of dukes, duchesses, marquesses, nusery maids, herbaceous borders, and breakfast kedgeree under its own silver lid, all of which is what makes Snobs such a good, fresh read.” —Telegraph

From the Publisher