Towneley Hall to host launch of Katharine Grant's family memoir
A new memoir by a member of one of Burnley's most historic families will be launched at the family’s ancestral home next week.
Katharine Grant, the third daughter of the late Sir Simon Towneley, will launch her memoir, Clinging to the Crags, at Towneley Hall on Monday, July 27th.
Published by SALT, the book looks back on her childhood during the 1960s and 1970s, offering readers an intimate and often humorous portrait of family life rooted in Lancashire's rugged countryside.
Rather than growing up at Towneley Hall itself, Grant describes a “Towneley childhood that wasn't a childhood at Towneley”, spent in an isolated family home set at the mouth of a gorge.
The publisher describes the memoir as “a story of home, rooted in rugged landscapes, exploring where we come from, and where we choose to end up.”
The book recounts life in a bustling household with “a plethora of sisters and one prized brother, a perpetually pregnant mother, an irascible father, cooks, gardeners, nannies and one wicked dog.”
Set against the backdrop of the wild moorland that inspired Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the memoir explores family traditions, inheritance and a way of life that was rapidly disappearing, while mixing stories of “champagne glasses and coal hods, ancient agas and vinyl records, dead chickens and escaped horses.”
It also reflects on the impact of Sir Simon Towneley's belief in male primogeniture – the traditional system under which estates passed to the eldest son – and the effect this had on family life.
Christopher Hamilton-Emery, founder of SALT, described the book as “a scintillating memoir that delves into and unpacks a deeply unusual, privileged childhood in the remains of what had been one of Britain's great estates.”
He added: “As it considers family relations, mishaps, primogeniture and inheritance, it becomes an impassioned goodbye to a centuries-old way of life.
“Yet far from centring on a tone of regret or loss, Katharine manages to signal these profound changes with such tremendous wit and panache it will leave readers laughing out loud.”
The book has also been praised by the acclaimed creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, who described it as “the tale of a family that defies understanding, not just because of the vivid personalities involved, but also because of our society’s obsessive concern for male primogeniture.”