From London to Ireland during the 1920s, a glorious, gripping, and richly textured story that takes us to the heart of the remarkable real-life story of the Guinness Girls -- for fans of Downton Abbey and Julian Fellowes' Belgravia.
Aileen. Maureen. Oonagh. The private lives of the Glorious Guinness Girls fascinated a nation. Granddaughters of the first Earl of Iveagh, the three daughters of Ernest Guinness are glamorous society girls, the toast of Dublin and London. Darlings of the press, with not a care in the world. Only Fliss, sent to live with the girls as a child to escape her impoverished Anglo-Irish family, knows what beautiful ruins lie behind the glass of their privileged existence.
Inspired by fascinating real events and a remarkable true story, from the turmoil of Ireland's War of Independence to the brittle glamour of 1920s London, this dramatic, richly textured reading group novel takes us into the heart of a beautiful but often painful hidden world.
UK Edition
Published in September 2020
US Edition
PUBLISHED IN May 2021
Reviews
“Hourican has to be commended for corralling huge amounts of meticulous research into a bright, pacy, readable account of the early lives of these extraordinary women and the wider social circles in which they travelled. Fans of Downton Abbey will adore this...”
- The Sunday Times
“The story combines the intimacy of a family drama, set against the most opulent of backdrops, with sweeping historical themes... Hourican brings an emotional depth to what she does, which is applied here to tease out the social dynamics of the upper classes, the limited scope of even the most affluent women's lives during that period, what it was to be a dependent woman, burgeoning feminism and the social upheaval of the time.”
- The Sunday Independent
“Emily Hourican creates a ... nuanced and complex portrait of not only the Guinness family and their associates, but of the unstable, ever-changing world they live in... It is [her] meditations on the politics of class and gender that really shine. Hourican’s treatment of these issues are reminiscent of Jane Austen—but more overtly political.”
- Books Ireland magazine
“The Glorious Guinness Girls is a joy to read. I would whole-heartedly agree that it is a must for all Downton Abbey fans. [It] is a gorgeous book, a captivating tale about a young girl caught up in the lifestyle of this family that continues to fascinate, The Guinness Family.”
- Swirlandthread.com
Extract
This takes place in 1918 and is Felicity – Fliss’s – first encounter with Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh Guinness. She is 11 and has been sent to live with the girls because her father has been killed in World War I, her Anglo-Irish family have little money, and there are few prospects for her. Fliss has travelled from her dilapidated home in Wexford, leaving her brother Hughie, to the Guinness’s house, Glenmaroon, in Castleknock, west Dublin, where they live with their parents Cloe and Ernest, and Gunnie and Mildred, grown-up cousins and companions to Cloe. At this time, Aileen is 14, Maureen, like Fliss, is 11 and Oonagh is 8.
-
‘We’ll go to the small drawing room. The family will be there now,’ Gunnie said. She was too eager to get to them to wait for me and I had to trot to keep up with her, along miles of wooden floors so shiny I longed to take off my shoes and slide in my stockings. I wondered if Cloé’s girls ever did that. The ceiling above me was a deep red, picked out with swirling white lines.
A vast staircase, of the same warm polished wood, led up to a wall of coloured glass prettily etched with flowers and birds. Light poured through it, bouncing off the floor and walls so that it was like being inside Mummie’s jewellery box, the one with the inlay mother-of-pearl lid. The smell was the same as the mother-of-pearl box – sun-soaked wood, beeswax, dust, with something precious at the heart.
Gunnie opened a door into a large bright room. Clustered at the far end at a round table set in the embrace of a deep bay window, five faces turned to stare at me: Cloé and her girls, and a tall lady with red hair.
‘Here we are, back again,’ said Gunnie, hand to my shoulder to gently push me forward. I let her push me although I wanted to resist. The group at the table were so self-contained, so still in the embrace of the window, that I didn’t want to intrude on them. I knew my face must be covered in smuts from the train and felt my hair escape my hat in an untidy way. Meanwhile they stared at me. So many pairs of blue eyes, blazing as if the light from the window poured through them too. Cloé’s girls dazzled more than I had remembered, now that I saw them in their own house.
‘Welcome, Felicity. This is Aileen,’ Cloé said. The tallest of the three nodded coolly at me. ‘And Maureen’; a flash of laughing blue and heavy golden curls. ‘And Oonagh’; the smallest, most solemn-eyed of the three looked at me and I looked back.
‘This is Peke,’ Oonagh said, holding up a small snub-nosed dog that looked out from behind a thick fringe with popping eyes. I could hear its laboured, effortful breathing loud in the absence of conversation.
‘And this is Mildred,’ Cloé continued, as if Oonagh hadn’t spoken. The lady with the red hair put out a hand. Beside the slender blue and gold of Cloé and her girls, she was large and pale and loose, spilling over her spindly chair towards the floor like syrup escaping from a tin. Her voice when she spoke was deep and with an accent I hadn’t heard before.
‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘So you’re the famous Felicity.’ I did not know what to say. How was I famous? I was not famous, at all, so why would she say that?
‘Mildred was born in America,’ Cloé said, almost wonderingly, as if unsure how such a person had come to be in their midst.
They looked at me, all of them, so I felt I must say something.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said at last. But because I was unsure and unhappy I said it in Mummie’s voice – the one that told you she wasn’t pleased, wasn’t even interested – so that hearing it, they all looked away and I didn’t know how to say that was not how I meant it to be.
‘We waited tea,’ Cloé said after a moment, as though this were something magnificent. She sat, I saw, so upright in her chair that her back did not touch it at all and even where she did rest, any contact seemed accidental, as though she had allowed herself to perch only lightly, momentarily, while in flight. ‘Gunnie, perhaps you would pour?’
There were sandwiches and scones but also tiny iced cakes and a bigger cake and pots of cream and jam and sweet preserves. I watched as the three girls took small pieces of this and that, as if they were not very interested in the delicious things in front of them. As if they saw such things every day. I was hungry but didn’t dare do different to them so I took small pieces too although I could have eaten everything on those pretty china plates.
‘I’m afraid you will not find our gardens to be as fine as yours,’ Cloé said then, to all of us although I knew she must mean me.
‘Felicity’s mother, Mrs Burke, is a most accomplished gardener. Her father was Admiral Redmond, you know.’ Somehow, this was almost always said of Mummie. As if to make up for the fact that she was just Mrs Burke now.
The three girls said very little and I said nothing and after a time Maureen said, ‘May I be excused, Mamma?’ and Cloé said very well. One by one all three girls slipped away and when they had gone Cloé said, ‘Gunnie, would you show Felicity to her room? And then perhaps you would bring me some lavender water? I feel a headache coming on and will lie down before dinner.’
‘Of course,’ Gunnie said. Beside me, I felt her quiver like a gundog at a shoot, the heady scent of duty in its nostrils.
With Gunnie I walked up the large staircase towards the window of coloured glass so that I felt we would walk into a song or a poem with the glow of it, then around a corner and up another staircase to a wide hallway with many closed doors. A kitchen or scullery maid came towards us from the far end of the hallway, so dirty and bedraggled that I was surprised to see her. At home, Mummie would never have allowed such a creature to be anywhere except the kitchen. I thought she might scamper away at the sight of us, but she came on until she was upon us and said in a voice that was low and thick, ‘Shure I can show the young laydy where she’ll be sleeping.’
Gunnie stood silent for a moment and then, ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You may do so.’ I was surprised and watched after her as she turned and went back down the stairs we had just ascended.
‘This way, Miss,’ the creature said. She smiled at me and there were blackened stumps where her teeth should have been, although she cannot have been much more than a child. She led me along the hall, around a corner and to another staircase behind a heavy door that was small and mean and led up and up into the roof of the house. As we walked up, her always ahead, she asked me questions, but her accent was so strange and solid that I could not always understand what she said so had to stay silent more than answer.
We climbed to an attic space that was so narrow we couldn’t walk abreast, and dark because there were only a very few small windows set high up in the roof. We walked to the very end where the creature opened a door into a dingy little room with an iron bed and a mattress with bare ticking and a misshaped bolster thrown across it. The walls were discoloured, mottled like flesh on a cold day, and the air was stuffy. The only window was set high up where I could not reach it and, by the cobwebs around it, did not seem to have been opened in the longest while.
‘Am I to sleep here, then?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
‘That you are,’ she said. ‘Shure, where else would you be? Is it with the family you thought you’d be sleeping?’ And she began to laugh.
I could bear it no more. I knew I had been sent from Ballytibbert because there was no money and no way to educate me – such things happened often to girls – but was I to be some kind of servant? Why had I not been told? What would Hughie say when he found out? At the thought of Hughie, who had always protected me so carefully, I began to cry. All the tears that I had held in on the train and at the station and since leaving home that morning began to fall in thick clumps and sobs escaped me in ragged gasps.
The creature stood and stared at me, no longer cackling but slouched against the doorframe. I wished she would go away and opened my mouth to tell her so when suddenly in the open doorway, like sunlight, Oonagh appeared, breathless from her climb.
‘Oh, please don’t cry,’ she said, face screwed up in sympathy.
‘Don’t cry, dear.’ But I couldn’t stop. ‘How could you?’ she said then, furiously rounding on the creature beside her in the doorway. ‘Of all the mean things...’
The creature rubbed hard at one of her teeth and said in quite a different voice, ‘It was only a joke.’
‘Not much of a joke, I think,’ Oonagh said, gesturing towards me with a small white hand. ‘Honestly, Maureen!’
At that the creature stood up straighter and pulled the dusty cap from her mop of curls. ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ she said without a trace of the accent I had found so hard to understand.
‘I’m sorry, then. There, will that do?’ to Oonagh and she looked at me and grinned a bit. ‘But I had you quite fooled, didn’t I?’
‘You did,’ I said, wiping at my face with the back of my hand. Oonagh handed me her handkerchief, a scrap of lace- edged cambric, so that I could dry my tears properly. ‘You did.’ I began to half-laugh although the tears were there too.
‘You mustn’t mind Maureen,’ Oonagh said. ‘She thinks there is nothing so amusing as fooling people with disguises.’
‘Well, there isn’t,’ Maureen said. She rubbed again at her teeth, which I saw were just painted with black, not missing, and grinned again at me. I, my upset almost forgotten now, grinned back.
‘Let me show you where your real room is,’ Oonagh said, taking my hand.
‘I’ll come too,’ Maureen said. ‘No hard feelings, I suppose?’