A Cotswold manor is for sale at £15 million, honey-coloured and perfectly symmetrical. Two centuries ago three sisters held it, in the very decade Jane Austen was writing about sisters who could hold no land.
Why we’re pointing you there
Foxcote Manor, near Withington in Gloucestershire, came to market this autumn transformed, its ivy stripped and its rooms gone cream. Intellicurean’s first Literary Experience sets the sale beside the county history, the listing and two Austen novels, and finds that almost nothing in the picture is what it seems. A woman named Sarah Jordan left the manor to three nieces, a will that runs the other way from the one that opens Sense and Sensibility. William Cobbett rode through in 1826 and read the village church as proof of decline, and the census answers him. The symmetrical stone front turns out to be more than three hundred years of work, dressed to look like a single moment.
What we liked most is how carefully it listens to the record, and to its silences. Where the documents can correct what we see, they do, plainly. Where they fall quiet, about a bequest, two weddings and a third sister who simply disappears, the essay lets the music in and asks what that longing is worth.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? 
