How to Marry an Earl

As a little girl I used to hate flying because it hurt my ears. And when I say hurt, I mean it felt as if someone was trying to drill right through them. This was unfortunate, since we regularly flew to Germany to visit family every Christmas, and often over Easter or the summer too. Of course I tried all the usual remedies – chewing gum; sucking mints; swallowing then yawning; yawning then swallowing. But as with most aches and pains, nothing worked half as well as a good book. And the book I remember working best was Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess below Stairs (1981, later reissued as The Secret Countess).

This novel tells the story of Anna Grazinsky, a Russian countess who, with her mother, brother and English governess, escapes the Revolution in 1919 and flees to England. The old wet nurse to whom the Grazinskys had entrusted the family jewels appears to have betrayed them, so they arrive in London almost penniless. Anna therefore decides – having first persuaded a family friend to pay her little brother’s school fees and left her mother in the care of the governess – that she must get a job. Being young, foreign, female and untrained, she has little choice but to work below stairs. She becomes a housemaid at Mersham, the Earl of Westerholme’s estate in Wiltshire, where she reveals herself as a not-so-secret countess. Indeed, though she works exceedingly hard and no one quite realizes the full extent of her former glory, she gives herself away at every step. No normal housemaid would eagerly study the outdated Domestic Servants’ Compendium and quote passages to her employers; or pepper her speech with Russian endearments and switch to French mid-conversation; or argue over the merits of Stravinsky’s music with the Earl’s uncle. And certainly no ordinary housemaid would mourn the loss of her family’s many estates. As Rupert, the Earl, jokingly observes: ‘In Russia all the housemaids have a lot of houses.’ Though she scrubs the house clean, Anna leaves her own mark on all Mersham’s inhabitants, making a friend of everyone – everyone, that is, save the Earl’s fiancée Muriel, a beautiful heiress with a passionate interest in eugenics. During the recent war Muriel had volunteered as a nurse for the express purpose of marrying a title. So when the injured and unmarried Lord Westerholme was wheeled into the hospital, she pounced. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Muriel and Rupert are thoroughly unsuited – and that he and Anna are perfectly matched. It is Anna who hears him moaning in his sleep and comforts him as he relives his nightmarish wartime plane crash, Anna who shares his passion for horses – Muriel wants sapphires instead. And it is Anna who loves his house and everybody connected with it. Muriel, on the other hand, secretly gets rid of the ‘simple-minded’ kitchen maid and tries to dissuade Rupert’s Jewish neighbours from attending their wedding. Yet poor Rupert is too honourable to break his promise, even to one so odious. I won’t spoil the denouement, just say that Proom the butler saves the day with a fabulously dreamt-up scheme worthy of Jeeves himself. Some readers have complained that the heroine of this story of riches to rags and back again is just too perfect. But though Anna is certainly brave, graceful, hardworking, kind and blessed with fantastic hair, she is never bland. She can be proud, stubborn, absurd and often insecure. When the Earl catches her bathing naked in the lake she is embarrassed at being ‘too thin’. When she remains unmolested by Uncle Sebastien, Mersham’s resident groper, she concludes that it is because she is ‘not pretty’. And she’s a great role model. Take the moment when Ollie, the little sister of Rupert’s best man, who is to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, turns to Anna in distress. Ollie is lame, and she has just heard Muriel hiss: ‘Why did no one tell me that the child was crippled!’ This hits Ollie like a physical blow. But Anna doesn’t commiserate, she mounts a counterattack:

‘It’s a word,’ said Anna shrugging. ‘It means someone who is lame. Well, you are lame. You are also pretty and good and have about one hundred and twenty people who love you very much and a hedgehog called Alexander.’

Anna then whisks Ollie off to the Russian Club. ‘Ollie’, she explains to her fellow exiles, ‘has been a little bit sad and I have told her that here it is possible to be instantly and completely happy. Was I correct?’ And of course, she is. The men are exceedingly gallant, drinking Ollie’s health and then throwing away the glasses so that ‘no lesser toast’ could ever be drunk from them. Sergei, Anna’s handsome cousin who has also fled to England, kisses Ollie’s hand and tells her gravely that he has always wanted to meet a girl ‘with hair the colour of a sunset over the steppes’. It’s a magical afternoon. Ibbotson shows her readers that looks are not everything, that they are not even what makes a man love a woman. There is a scene in which Tom, Ollie’s brother, asks his bookish neighbour Susie why she keeps turning him down. In response, she asks him to look at her properly, at her ‘plump’ body and ‘hooked nose’.

‘How dare you!’ Tom had seized her shoulders . . . ‘You could weigh as much as a hippopotamus and shave your head and wear a wig and it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I never said you were beautiful. I never thought it. I said that you were you.’

I thought it was the most romantic declaration I’d ever heard – and so did Susie. Like me, Ibbotson grew up speaking first German and then English – though in rather more dramatic circumstances. Born in Austria in 1925 to a Jewish family, she moved to Britain when she was 8, just as the Nazis were rising to power. Perhaps that explains the darker undertones of this romantic comedy – the anti-Semitism, the threat from a violent regime and the resulting exile – and Ibbotson’s concern with belonging. Love across the language barrier is the setting for several of her other romances. In A Song for Summer (1997) an Englishwoman falls for an Austrian man; and in both Magic Flutes (1982) and The Morning Gift (1993: see SF no. 85) an Englishman falls for an Austrian girl. In The Secret Countess she shows how a foreign language can be both a barrier and also, paradoxically, a bridge, leading to a deeper mutual understanding. Anna’s English, though accented, is perfectly fluent. Yet Rupert is always aware of her Russianness, of that ‘wonderful, damnable language that separated yet joined them’. When he asks Anna to say that she loves him, she refuses to do so in English: ‘I will tell you in my own language so that you will not understand. Or so that you will understand completely.’ He has no idea what her Russian words mean, but he catches the ‘strange, solemn integrity’ of the emotion beneath them, and understands that she is ‘offering him this, her life, for all eternity’. For me The Secret Countess proved a highly effective remedy for earache, and Ibbotson herself viewed her romances as curative, writ ten for ‘intelligent women, possibly but not necessarily with the flu, who want a few hours of beguilement’. They combine Georgette Heyer’s impeccable research with P. G. Wodehouse’s light-hearted wit, and after a little trouble her heroines, like Jane Austen’s, live happily ever after. Today, I prescribe Ibbotson’s novels liberally and prophylactically, irrespective of age or ailment.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Emily Schroeder 2025