Lady Ludlow will not have the village children taught to read, because she once knew what a written word did in France; around her, an estate is changing hands and manners, and she is the last person who cannot see it. Gaskell, a Manchester minister's wife, wrote this in 1858; the tale within the tale — the French Terror — is the reason for everything the old woman believes, and it lands like a shot. Sixty plates of Gainsborough and Raeburn portraits and country scenes, 1772 to 1837, catch the very English world of estates and manners that Lady Ludlow cannot stop from slipping away.
