14 Books To Read If You Love Downton Abbey

Suffering from Downton withdrawal? Here, these will help.               

posted on Feb. 26, 2014, at 10:15 a.m.

1. Snobs by Julian Fellowes

The best comedies of manners are often deceptively simple, seamlessly blending social critique with character and story. In his superbly observed first novel, Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey and winner of an Academy Award for his original screenplay of Gosford Park, brings us an insider’s look at a contemporary England that is still not as classless as is popularly supposed.

2. The Love & Inheritance Trilogy by Fay Weldon

As the writer of the pilot episode of the original Upstairs, Downstairs, Fay Weldon brings a deserved reputation for magnificent storytelling. With wit and sympathy—and no small measure of mischief—the Love & Inheritance Trilogy plots the interplay of restraint and desire, manners and morals, reason and instinct, as it follows the Earl of Dilberne and the rest of the family who inhabits the household in Belgrave Square.

3. Rutherford Park by Elizabeth Cooke

In Rutherford Park, Lady of the house Octavia Cavendish lives like a bird in a gilded cage. With her family’s fortune, her husband, William, has made significant additions to the estate, but he too feels bound—by the obligations of his title as well as his vows. Their son, Harry, is expected to follow in his footsteps, but the boy has dreams of his own, like pursuing the new adventure of aerial flight. Meanwhile, below stairs, a housemaid named Emily holds a secret that could undo the Cavendish name.
On Christmas Eve 1913, Octavia catches a glimpse of her husband in an intimate moment with his beautiful and scandalous distant cousin. She then spies the housemaid Emily out in the snow, walking toward the river, about to make her own secret known to the world. As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, an epic tale of longing and betrayal is about to unfold at Rutherford Park…

4. Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks

P.G. Wodehouse documented the lives of the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster for nearly sixty years, from their first appearance in 1915 (“Extricating Young Gussie”) to his final completed novel (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen) in 1974. These two were the finest creations of a novelist widely proclaimed to be the finest comic English writer by critics and fans alike. Forty years later, Bertie and Jeeves returned in a hilarious affair of mix-ups and mishaps. With the approval of the Wodehouse estate, acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks brought these two back to life for their legion of fans.

5. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

6. The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin

In The American Heiress, Cora Cash (whose family mansion in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilts’) suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England. Nothing is quite as it seems, however: Ivo is withdrawn and secretive, and the English social scene is full of traps and betrayals. Money, Cora soon learns, cannot buy everything, as she must decide what is truly worth the price in her life and her marriage.

In The Fortune Hunter, Sisi has everything - except happiness. Bored with the stultifying etiquette of the Hapsburg Court and her dutiful but unexciting husband, Franz Joseph, Sisi comes to England to hunt. She comes looking for excitement and she finds it in the dashing form of Captain Bay Middleton… Bay and the Empress are as reckless as each other, and their mutual attraction is a force that cannot be denied.

7. The Last Summer by Judith Kinghorn

In The Last Summer, Clarissa Granville lives with her parents and three brothers in the idyllic isolation of Deyning Park, a grand English country house, where she whiles away her days enjoying house parties, country walks and tennis matches. Clarissa is drawn to Tom Cuthbert, the housekeeper’s handsome son. Though her parents disapprove of their upstairs-downstairs friendship, the two are determined to see each other, and they meet in secret to share what becomes a deep and tender romance. But soon the winds of war come to Deyning, as they come to all of Europe. As Tom prepares to join the front lines, neither he nor Clarissa can envision what lies ahead of them in the dark days and years to come. Nor can they imagine how their love will be tested, or how they will treasure the memory of this last, perfect summer.

8. The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

A love story of love and marriage among the old and new moneyed classes, The Buccaneers is a delicately perceptive portrayal of a world on the brink of change. After Wharton’s death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, “If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton’s novels.”

9. Below Stairs and Servants’ Hall by Margaret Powell

Margaret Powell’s compelling and colorful memoirs take the reader inside the forgotten world of domestic service—a true slice of life from a time when armies of servants lived below stairs simply to support the lives of those above. Arriving at the great houses of 1920s London, fifteen-year-old Margaret’s life in service was about to begin… Margaret’s tales of her time in service are told with wit, warmth, and a sharp eye for the prejudices of her situation.

10. Summerset Abbey by T.J. Brown

In Summerset Abbey, Rowena and Victoria—daughters to the second son of the Earl of Summerset—have always treated their governess’s daughter, Prudence, like a sister. But when their father dies and they move in with their uncle’s family in a much more traditional household, Prudence is relegated to the maids’ quarters, much to the girls’ shock and dismay. The impending war offers each girl hope for a more modern future, but the ever-present specter of class expectations makes it difficult for Prudence to maintain a foot in both worlds.