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    Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien
    Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien
    Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien
    Ebook55 pages26 minutes

    Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien

    By Jessica Fellowes and Matthew Sturgis

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This richly illustrated short, extracted from the official book The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, focuses on the characters individually, examining their motivations, their actions and the inspirations behind them. Forwarded by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.

    Thomas Barrow is one of the most complicated and intriguing of all the characters at Downton Abbey. As we have got to know him through years of both peace and war, multiple layers have been peeled away to reveal an insecure, jealous, sometimes paranoid, defensive and cowardly man beneath a glossy veneer of good looks and arrogance.

    ‘O’Brien realises that she is never going to be rich or successful – although she is quite successful as the lady’s maid of a countess,” says Julian Fellowes. “But she gets her thrills by manipulating and being devious and plotting. Her reward is in having a sense that she has power over people.’

    Purchase this ebook short and the others in the series to get closer still to the characters at Downton Abbey and to understand more about their social context – from the changing role of the aristocracy to fashion and beauty, American Anglophiles, the Suffragette movement and life below stairs in a big country house like Downton.

    Search for The Chronicles of Downton Abbey to purchase all shorts combined.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateDec 18, 2012
    ISBN9780007517268
    Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien
    Author

    Jessica Fellowes

    JESSICA FELLOWES is an author, journalist, and public speaker. She is the author of The Mitford Murders novels as well as the New York Times bestselling official companion books to the Downton Abbey TV series. Former deputy editor of Country Life, and columnist for the Mail on Sunday, she has written for the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, The Sunday Times, and The Lady. Jessica has spoken at events across the UK and US, and has made numerous appearances on radio and television. She lives in Oxfordshire with her family.

    Read more from Jessica Fellowes

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      Book preview

      Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O’Brien - Jessica Fellowes

      Downton-Cover.png

      Mr Thomas Barrow and Miss Sarah O'Brien

      Extracted from

      The Chronicles of Downton Abbey

      Foreword

      Julian Fellowes

      Text

      Jessica Fellowes and Matthew Sturgis

      Photography

      Joss Barratt, Nick Briggs and Giles Keyte

      Logo.tif

      Foreword

      Julian Fellowes

      Over the last two rather extraordinary years, at the risk of sounding vain, I have often been asked why I thought Downton Abbey has been quite such a success. Of course it is hard to be definite about these things. If television were an exact science, there would be nothing made that did not break records. But supposing I were to put my finger on one element, it might be that we have made the decision to treat every character, the members of the family and the members of their staff, equally, in terms of their narrative strength. They all have emotional lives, dreams, ambitions and disappointments, and with all of them we suggest a back story. So this book, which is an invitation to get to know the characters and their backgrounds more fully, will, I hope, build on that and allow the reader to develop his or her relationship with the figures in our landscape.

      In a way, the decision to write the show at all came out of emotional, rather than historical, curiosity. When Gareth Neame made the original suggestion that we should together travel back into Gosford Park land, this time for television, I was initially undecided, but it so happened that I was reading a book, To Marry an English Lord, which was about the Buccaneers – those American heiresses who arrived in such numbers during the

      1880

      s and

      90

      s, to rescue many great houses in distress. It occurred to me that while people had a mental image of beauties like Consuelo Vanderbilt or Cornelia Bradley-Martin stepping ashore into the (not always very willing) arms of a waiting nobleman, few bothered to think about those same women,

      20

      ,

      30

      ,

      40

      years later, marooned in some freezing country house in the Midlands, with envious thoughts of their sisters in their comfortable, centrally heated cottages in Newport. Most of them outlived

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