“SNOBS” by Julian Fellowes

I discovered the author Julian Fellowes in 2005 when I bought his book “Snobs”; this was happening five years before he created the famous series “Downton Abbey”.

The action of the book takes place in England in the ’90s, and the subject is the marriage between Edith, a beautiful commoner, and Charles, an Earl whose family still had “their estates intact”.

The next discussion is between Edith and her friend, who introduced her to Charles:
“-And you don’t want to get married?”

“-Well, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life answering the telephone in an estate agent’s office if that’s what you mean.
-I’m twenty-seven. I have no qualifications and, what is worse, no particular talent. I also have tastes that require, at the very least, eighty thousand a year. What do you suggest I should do?”

“-So you intend to marry a rich man?”

“-Not necessarily, she answered, with a trace of defensiveness in her voice.
-It’s just that I cannot imagine I would be very happy married to a poor one.”

Apparently, without talents, Edith had something appealing to the affluent men:
“She was a type, albeit a superior example of it: the English blonde with large eyes and nice manners.”

Using the couple’s story, Julian Fellowes is sharing with us the mentality of commoners eager to rub shoulders with the peers. But also the aristocracy’s mentality afraid to let an outsider enter their inner circle: “the aristocracy’s circle of acquaintance is much smaller and so there is invariably with them the sense of the membership of a club.”

It is interesting how Julian Fellowes described being a woman in today’s world:
“Being a woman wasn’t like being a man.
Men were either born with money or they spent years beavering away at careers to make themselves rich while women… women can be poor one day and rich, or at least married to a rich man, the next.
It might not be fashionable to admit it but even in this day and age, a woman’s life can be utterly transformed by means of the right ring.”

I owe it to Julian Fellowes that I became interested in the rules of British aristocracy (I am fascinated by how the title and the fortune are transferred only to the male line).
I read a lot of books on this subject, and I am going to tell you all about it.

Editura Phoenix, 2005