Successful novelists bereft of a plot too often make literary journeys or write literary lives, risking exposure either way as unreliable journalists or inadequate academics. Penelope Lively takes a more interesting step out of her usual line. Her story of a house is also a side-view of a century. It is, or was, the family house, or rather one of its houses, since with unusual candour she describes the cousinage as 'upper class', meaning rich. Her father's Reckitt clan, originally Quakers from Hull, built their fortune on the starch and polish that kept Victorian households stiff and bright, and cleverly diversified into Dettol as housemaids grew scarce.

The house is in Somerset, surrounded by coverts and paddocks full of horses, each one carefully named in the photographs that stuffed the fat hall-chest. A male of the clan would probably have gone on unreadably about schools and bloodsports, followed by regiments and bloodletting. Here, though, the sensibility is feminine, even ladylike. I mean that political incorrectness as a compliment, though many wouldn't.

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