Life with Dad, a squire obsessed with a manor

THIS enthralling book is not just another tale of restoring -- and living in the decaying magnificence of -- an English country estate. The story that Miranda Seymour unfolds against the background of Thrumpton Hall has enough drama -- and psychodrama -- to give playwright Harold Pinter a run for his money. There is comedy in her father’s house, but festering emotional wounds, slights and injuries invest it with the stuff of tragedy.

The author’s father, George FitzRoy Seymour, spent his life aspiring to be an aristocrat. Connected by bloodlines and marriage to several of England’s most distinguished families, he reveled in being a descendant of King Charles II. Tragically, as far as he was concerned, he had no title, was unlikely to inherit one and failed to be awarded one despite spending his life as a country squire.

Miranda Seymour’s unsparing account of life with her father is a chilling portrait of obsession and selfishness, a fascinating picture of a singular family dynamic and a glimpse into his strange, late sexual flowering. But it is also a brilliant exposition of what it is like to get some of what you want when young, then never have quite enough of what it takes to really make a go of it in a grand way. In short, “Thrumpton Hall” is a classic study of the perils of marginality.

George Seymour fell in love with the Nottinghamshire house, where his diplomat parents parked him at the age of 2 when they were posted abroad. The handsome if somewhat dilapidated old pile, set in its own park, belonged to his aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Byron (yes, the poet’s family). These Byrons were childless, and eventually, after a lot of maneuvering, Seymour, newly married in his 20s, found himself the proud owner of his childhood paradise. But this was bleak postwar Britain, a time of punitive taxation and servant shortages, and so began a roller coaster of triumphs and disappointments that went on for nearly half a century until his death in 1994.

Miranda Seymour’s “J’Accuse” of her father -- for much of the book reads like an indictment -- is interspersed with reactions from her mother, who is far more forgiving of her husband’s flaws and transgressions but, as it turns out, has perhaps even more to forgive. In the hands of a less accomplished writer, this device might have been clumsy or tedious, but here it adds perspective to the daughter’s peevishness.

At times, the author seems coy about her father’s sexuality. But she is simply biding her time, controlling her narrative in a manner that will not surprise anyone who has read her biographies of Mary Shelley and Henry James. When she finally does deliver her denouement, it bursts upon the reader with maximum shock value.

What makes this book particularly subtle and interesting is Seymour’s divided view of her father’s obsession with the house. On the one hand, she abhorred him and it, and was witness and participant to so much of its agony and costs (financial and emotional), yet, as her mother constantly reminds her, she is very much like him.

Inscribed on George Seymour’s tombstone at Thrumpton Hall are the same words that Sir Christopher Wren, architect of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, chose to have inscribed in its great dome: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. (“If you want my monument, look around you.”) And in the end, this grandiloquent echo doesn’t seem all that out of place. Miranda Seymour inherited Thrumpton on her father’s death and lives there still; her solution to keeping it afloat is to rent it out as a venue for weddings, movie shoots and such sundry events as murder-mystery evenings. So both she and her mother are right: She is his daughter after all but appears to have found a better to way to live with this splendid incubus.

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Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”