The country house and the English novel
From Austen to Waugh to McEwan, great novelists have been drawn to stately homes. Why are grand country houses such a national literary obsession, asks Blake MorrisonThe stately homes of England How beautiful they stand!Amidst their tall ancestral trees,O'er all the pleasant land.(Felicia Hemans, 1827)Evelyn Waugh came to regret Brideshead Revisited. In a 1959 preface to its reissue, he apologised for h…