Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey : The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle

from SLamkin

Although this is not a biography, this book gives a great outline of Lady Almina and it reads like a novel. As a big fan of Downtown Abbey I really enjoyed learning the bases of some of the story lines of the show. However, as I read this book, I found that the real story is just as interesting a...

from satyridae

I didn't expect this to be a riveting book, but it was. I was expecting a puff piece tying the history of Highclere to the Downton Abbey series. I am not the least bit disappointed to have been utterly wrong. The true story (one assumes sanitized at least a little, of course) is many times more i...

from maggie1944

I need to write a review of [Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey] by The Countess of Carnarvon, c. 2011 I am partial to biographies, and history, and historical fiction. I love peeking into others' lives. And this, of course, was just up my alley. The writing was good enough that it did not di...

from cameling

I thought this would be fluff, but it turned out to be the very opposite. Through photos and excerpts from family archives, the focus is primarily on Lady Almina, the Countess of Carnarvon after her marriage to the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. Highclere Castle may be the setting for the popular TV seri...

from NewsieQ

The current (8th) Countess of Carnarvon spins the tale of one of her predecessors (5th) - and what a story it is. Almina was the illegitimate daughter and only child of Alfred de Rothschild (of the banking family) and his mistress, Marie Wombwell. She was indulged on a scale that most people can ...