Life in the English Country House (First Folio Society Edition)

GIROUARD, Mark (intro. Simon Jenkins; binding design John Pumfrey). Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. London: The Folio Society, 2019.

Quarto (289 × 206 mm). Full printed cloth with architect-designed binding by John Pumfrey. Spine lettered in gilt. Pale grey endleaves printed with illustration by Pumfrey. xiv, 357 pp. 24 pages of full-colour plates; extensive black and white illustrations, plans, and photographs throughout, including interiors, exteriors, and elevations. Photographs primarily sourced from the archives of Country Life magazine and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Green slipcase titled in gilt and printed in black with detail from binding. First Folio Society edition. Preface by Mark Girouard; introduction by Simon Jenkins.

Mark Girouard (1931–2022) was the foremost British architectural historian of his generation — a scholar whose work on the English country house, the Victorian city, and Elizabethan architecture fundamentally shaped the way these subjects are understood, and whose gift for communicating architectural history to a broad readership without condescending to it made him a figure of unusual reach in British cultural life. He worked as architectural editor of Country Life from 1964, served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1975 and 1976, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and produced a body of work — including The Victorian Country House (1971), Sweetness and Light (1977), Life in the English Country House (1978), and Life in the French Country House (2000) — that constitutes the essential library on its subject. He died in August 2022; this Folio Society edition, to which he contributed a preface, is among the last books to carry his own words.

Life in the English Country House, first published by Yale University Press in 1978 and based on the Slade lectures Girouard had delivered at Oxford, is at once a work of social history and of architectural analysis — a study not of what English country houses look like but of how they worked: the political and social functions they performed, the hierarchies they housed, the ceremonies they required, the way their plans evolved in response to changing ideas about privacy, entertainment, hospitality, and power. Beginning in the medieval period, when the great hall was the social centre of everything, and moving through the Tudor, Stuart, Georgian, and Victorian eras to the twentieth century, Girouard traces the gradual redrawing of the architectural boundary between the family and its servants, between public display and private life, between the house as an instrument of political influence and the house as a home.

The Folio Society edition presents the complete text with a new introduction by Simon Jenkins — the architectural journalist, former editor of The Times, and author of England's Thousand Best Houses — alongside over one hundred colour and black and white illustrations drawn from oil paintings, watercolours, illuminated manuscripts, measured drawings, and the incomparable archive of Country Life magazine. The binding, designed by architect John Pumfrey, gives the edition a visual character that places it in deliberate dialogue with its subject.

Fine. Pristine copy. Very mild shelf markings to slipcase only.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000588