Horn, Pamela. Ladies of the Manor: Wives and Daughters in Country-House Society, 1830-1918.

Stroud, UK: Alan Sutton, 1991.

While Mark Girouard is the best and best-known authority on the phenomenon and institution of the English country house, Horn is undoubtedly the leading expert on the people who lived there. She’s also one of the very best authors when it comes to domestic history of the Victorian era, from the scullery maids in the basement kitchen to the children in the attic nursery.

Heyer, Georgette. Venetia.

NY: Putnam, 1958.

Between 1921 and 1972, in addition to a number of mysteries and other less-remembered works, Heyer turned out nearly three dozen historical romances set in the Regency era — the second decade of the 19th century, during the close of the generation-long war with France. Naturally, though none of them is terrible, some of them are rather better than others. I’ve read most of them over the years, and I put this delightfully complex story among the top three or four.

Byatt, A. S. The Shadow of the Sun.

NY: Harcourt, 1964.

Sometimes, a young writer’s first novel is a blockbuster, a runaway bestseller. (This seems more likely to be the case when its style is heavily cinematic.) And this is unfortunate, in a way, because any subsequent work then has a sort of doom hanging over it for its author: Will the next one be as good as my first book? More often, though, for a “literary” author, the first book is likely to be a bit tentative, just a toe in the water. Then the work improves and draws more attention as the corpus grows. Practice makes perfect.