Although the implication is that this book covers all of the scope of a 'Mistress of the House' in relation to country estates, in fact it concentrates very heavily on their building (and to some extent collecting) activities, and says relatively little about other parts of their lives - although these are covered rather superficially in the introductory chapters. The book is well-illustrated and the individual case studies interesting and sympathetically done. The exception to those is the first, on Louise de Keroualle, who really doesn't belong in this book at all, having lived mostly in a King's palace and then in France. ( )

‘Gold,’ as Mrs Montagu reported, ‘is the chief ingredient in the composition of worldly happiness.’ The subjects of Rosemary Harris’s book are the women, married to great or rich men, who spent their family fortunes on beautiful houses (castles, London town houses and country cottages) and glamorous interiors. They employed the best architects and designers, painters, upholsterers, potters and gardeners and left behind them monuments of exquisite taste. Mrs Montagu, at her country retreat Sandleford Priory, went so far as to arrange for haymakers to grace her views. ‘I had yesterday thirty-six haymakers, and their children, at dinner, in a grove in the garden. When they work in my sight, I love to see that they eat as well as labour, and often send a treat’.

The properties considered range from Ham House (bombed in the Second World War), Norfolk House (demolished), Alnwick Castle, Worksop Manor (pulled down), Audley End, Saltram House and Lancaster House. The shopping these houses generated was monumental. Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth had, according to John Evelyn, a ‘splendid Appartment at Whitehall, luxuriously furnished & with ten times the richnesse & glory beyond the Queenes, such massy pieces of Plate, whole Tables, Stands etc of incredible vale’. Elizabeth, Duchess of Seymour’s Alnwick Castle was, wrote one visitor wrote, ‘extremely noble & elegant in the Gothick taste but the drawing room pleased me most ... The ornaments of both these rooms on walls & ceiling are done in very good gothic style of stucco. My Lady’s Bed Chamber, Dressing Room etc are very suitably finished.’

Despite all this consumption and expenditure it was the presence of these great ladies that were so necessary to animate their houses. The Duke of Rutland asked his wife: ‘Have you ascertained when ... Belvoir Castle is truly to be Blessed with the presence of her, without whom everything around it affects to stand still?’ She returned to the renovated castle in time for Christmas.

This was an engrossing book, looking at the role of a number of women and how they influenced the building and decoration and some of the greatest houses in Britain in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. After a few preliminary chapters, setting the scene of women's status and opportunities, it devotes a chapter each to the selected subjects. Obviously these are generally aristoctratic women, as these are those for whom most documentary evidence exists (it's noted in the bibliography that the Gordon archive in the National Archives of Scotland weigh over SIX tons). The author has concentrated on primary resources and this gives a freshness to the work, given that some of the subjects are extensively written of elsewhere. As much as possible, external influences are discussed as well as the relations between the commissioner and her architects/designers. What is emphasised is how varied the role of some of these women were, being married they were expected to be hostess, manager and had main resposibility for the servants (as well as producing children), not always with the support of their husbands, and sometimes also physically isolated in an era when travel was difficult. This means that this is almost as much a character study as a work on design, and what shines through was how determined each of her subject were, despite having very different characters. ( )