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Etiquette and Entertaining: To Help You On Your Social Way

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This book is a thorough guide to English social etiquette in upper/upper middle class society between the wars.

Chapter headings include "Modern Maids and What to Teach Them," "Etiquette for Bachelors," "How to Give a Little Cocktail Party," "Toasts and Speeches," and much more.

Includes 15 full page photographic illustrations showing, for example, how to lay place settings for breakfast and lunch, plus many small line drawings alongside the text.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

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About the author

Laura, Lady Troubridge (née Gurney) was born in 1867. She was a descendant of the Gurney banking family of Norfolk, a great-niece of Elizabeth Fry, and a granddaughter of the political historian Henry Thoby Prinsep.

When their father's business failed, she and her sister Rachel became sales assistants for the London society fashion designer Madame Elise. Rachel married the 2nd Earl of Dudley in 1891, and Laura married her cousin Sir Thomas Herbert Cochrane Troubridge, 4th Baronet, in 1893.

She had two daughters and one son, and wrote under the name of Lady Troubridge. She died in 1946.

She should not be confused with her husband's sister, the diarist and letter-writer born Laura Troubridge (c. 1857-1929), who married Adrian Hope; nor with Una, Lady Troubridge, the first wife of her husband's brother Admiral Sir Ernest Charles Thomas Troubridge (KCMG), who left him to live with Radclyffe Hall.

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Profile Image for Rosemary.
2,171 reviews100 followers
September 8, 2020
I'm not sure how I came to have this book. I think I must have bought it to save it from pulping when it failed to sell in the shop. But when I needed a book containing the word "frontispiece" for a challenge, it was the obvious choice (the frontispiece in question being a photograph of Lady Troubridge in mink and pearls).

I suspect these rules were already becoming old-fashioned when the book was published in 1939. Here you will learn exactly what to do with your visiting cards, how to give a sherry party, how to run a house with only one maid (I think Lady T assumes you also have a cook, however...), what to do in every role at a wedding, who holds the baby at christenings, and how to address the wreath you send to a funeral.

It is rather fun, but not exactly unputdownable. Would be very useful for anyone writing a novel set in the 1930s. Otherwise, best taken in small chunks.
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