Memoirs of a House - by Natalie Beaumont (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

When Nathaniel Norton--who had studied law at Yale but became the head of the real estate department of Met Life instead--bought a house in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1908, he may or may not have imagined that his family would occupy it uninterrupted for four generations.
To us, it's inconceivable.
It wasn't unheard-of then.
This book describes in intimate, highly readable detail what being in such a family was like.
It is a very old family. Norton was born in 1839, a century before the author. "In 1639," she writes, "a Thomas Norton, or Norville, emigrated from Guilford, England, to Guilford, Connecticut. . . . Six centuries before that, in 1066, his ancestor Le Seigneur de Norville had sailed with William the Conqueror from Normandy to England. The Seigneur, a constable, had married into the house of Valois. Those were my maternal ancestors. My paternal ancestors also came to England with William I, in particular Robert of Meulan, whose surname was Beaumont. Another line of Nortons descended from Baldwin I, Count of Flanders, who married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne, and produced Matilda, later the wife of William the Conqueror."
This history has contributed profoundly to the habits of mind, the sense of graciousness, and the dry wit of successive generations of the Norton, Hazelton, and Beaumont families. And it achieves a rich, incisive expression in the hands of Natalie Beaumont, author of The Short Side of Paradise (Full Court Press, 2015), an earlier memoir in the same breezy, nonchalant narrative style.

Review Quotes

"The haunting, poetic, bitter-sweet account of a family though the history of the house it occupied for nearly a hundred years--written with such fluidity and ease I couldn't put it down."
--Jim Gold, author of
Mad Shoes, Crusader Tours, and
A Treasury of International Folk Dances

"Filled with charming stories and relevant history, Memoirs of a House is a delightful reflection on a family's life in a Victorian house over 92 years."
--Marcy Steele, retired higher-education management consultant

"Charming, witty, and intelligent--that is how Natalie Beaumont describes the formal and not-so-formal dinners at her family home in Memoirs of a House. And the with the same charm and wit, she meanders down memory lane through four generations of a single family living in a Victorian home in Englewood, New Jersey. Room by room, with a light touch that remains consistent through the good times and the not-so-good, she vividly shows us how love suffuses the humanity of her family, by which they live and die. It's a deeply inspiring story we can all profit from."
--Eugenia Koukounas, author of
All Our Relations: One Path to
Devotional Practice and Winslow's Promise

"Natalie's book takes you back to a gentler and kinder time through ancestral stories, and her growing up in a beautiful and magical house in Englewood, New Jersey. Her writing is both vivid and crisp, and I greatly enjoyed this fun read."
--Marilyn Arons, author of
The Nonlawyer Lady: A Life in Special Education