Storming the castle: The world of Dora and the Duchess

Storming the Castle tells the colorful upstairs/downstairs saga of two remarkable, unsung women of the Edwardian era, whose lives would intersect in Canada at that era's precipitate end. While the ninth Duchess of Devonshire and her cook were born to as different destinies as can be imagined, those destinies were forged in a singular historical moment.

These were the last golden days of Empire, remembered as much for their splendor and pageantry as for their utter obliteration in the First World War. In this, la belle epoque, Ritz and Escoffier would reinvent magnificently the trappings of leisure, while women would attempt to reinvent the sexual hierarchy. This was the social and political backdrop in which Evelyn Lansdowne and Dorothea Mary Lee would find themselves.

Evelyn, the beautiful daughter of Lord and Lady Lansdowne, was born to privilege. But privilege, as she would learn, had its price. Her marriage to Victor Cavendish soon to become the ninth Duke of Devonshire and later, Canada's Governor-General would literally and materially entitle her. But it would also cloak her in the increasingly heavy mantle of service to Queen and country. She was a woman divided, her needs and desires often at odds with her public role.

Dora Lee, the daughter of a wheelwright, was by age thirteen sent from home to work as a scullery maid. Yet by age twenty-four, she had risen, remarkably, to the position of cookfor some of England's most aristocratic households, none more so than that of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, in whose service she would embark for Canada.

Together, albeit from opposite sides of the parlor doors, the stories of Dora and the Duchess offer us an intimate and uniquely well-documented social portrait of the halcyon days of the ruling class, and the servant class who toiled for its pleasure. And as the narratives of Evie and Dora intertwine at Rideau Hall, the Governor-General's mansion in Ottawa, in the early years of this century, they bear close, bittersweet witness to the decimation of that splendid , rarified world in the cauldron of war.