Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses By Rosemary Baird

From the châtelaine of Alnwick Castle to the bluestocking of Montagu House, who decorated a room entirely with feathers, these enterprising ladies are almost as tiring to read about as they must have been to encounter, concludes Sue Gaisford

Jane, Duchess of Gordon, had a novel way of encouraging men to join the Gordon Highlanders. Sporting a black feather bonnet and riding a white horse, she would offer them the King's Shilling from between her teeth: those who took the golden guinea could boast that they had kissed a duchess. This was clearly a flamboyant woman with an instinct for marketing, yet when the rapturous Lord Montboddo visited her in 1796 he was impressed by a more ethereal quality. Her Grace had about her, he enthused, a "brilliancy and radiance... like the rays around the head of an apostle".

It's a fair bet that most of us know as little about the beguiling Jane as about the beguiled but otherwise obscure Montboddo. If it did nothing else, this book should be welcomed for telling us more, for she was in her way just as mesmeric and adventurous a character as her great social and political rival Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. A wild child who rode squealing pigs through the Edinburgh streets, the high-spirited Jane, at 18, reeled in her aristocratic husband at a party he nearly didn't attend as he thought he had nothing to wear. After that, she brought up nine of his "natural" children alongside her own legitimate offspring. A consummate matchmaker, she secured a baronet, a marquess and three dukes as sons-in-law which (though one daughter left her duke in favour of an attractive footman) was an undeniably impressive record.

Jane really deserves a book to herself. But her presence here is due less to her formidable character than to her position as châtelaine of Gordon Castle - which she smartened up in the 1770s - and as the builder of Kinrara Lodge in the Highlands. She also, incidentally, shifted an entire village, once she'd decided that it obscured her view. She was, as were Rosemary Baird's other subjects, a demolisher, renovator, builder, designer and decorator on the grandest possible scale. These women knew precisely what they wanted to do with the very stately homes they acquired on marriage and, generally, they had the cash to do it.

Some of them must have been excellent company. Elizabeth, Duchess of Northumberland, was a large and cheerful woman, jovial, brash and confident. Boswell, vastly impressed by her as an example of the old nobility, declared that he was her tame spaniel though the waspish Horace Walpole called her the Duchess of Charing Cross and considered her vulgar. Certainly she was no intellectual and was given to recording such recondite aphorisms as "A woman without modesty is like a ragout without salt." Her poem about a butter muffin was, at the time of its publication, dismissed as neither witty nor elegant, though surely it should have got top marks for originality of subject. Besides, you warm to someone who can casually invite 1,500 people to a party and whose theatrical and chivalric mediaeval flourishes at Alnwick Castle can still evoke a world so magical that it provides the setting for Hogwarts school in the Harry Potter films.

Some of the lady-builders were more academically inclined. The fearless Elizabeth Robinson, Mrs Montagu, both coined and exemplified the bluestocking, so much so that Doctor Johnson dubbed her the Queen of the Blues and remarked that she exerted "more mind in conversation than any person I ever met with". Perhaps we should not be surprised that Mrs Thrale - for so many years Johnson's muse - disagreed, censuring the woman for her love of finery and her habit of only cultivating people of consequence. Her presence among so many grandes dames of the landed gentry is explained by the work she did at Montagu House. She wanted, she said, to give her house "a sort of splendid comfortableness" and many of her guests considered that she had succeeded. The place was famous for a (frankly rather nasty-sounding) Feather Room where the partridge and the stubble-goose contributed to a tapestry made entirely of plumage or, as the poet Cowper memorably, if execrably, expressed it: "The birds put off their ev'ry hue / To dress a room for Montagu."

As a catalogue of powerful eccentrics, this book makes entertaining reading but it aims higher. Rosemary Baird's declared subject is "the symbiosis between a woman and her house". Here she encounters two principal difficulties. First, when bills were settled by the husband, it is hard to know which spouse did the ordering and designing. Secondly, in the case of many a splendid mansion redesigned during her selected period, no documents remain to help the historian.

Ms Baird's solution is to open her book with an ambitious, exhaustive, exhausting social history. Among her many subjects are the mores of visiting in town and country; the changing dinner-hour; fashion trends in interior design and the history of wall-decorations from tapestries through Chinese paper to leather hangings to print-rooms and beyond. She writes about porcelain, glass and ormolu; jewellery, clothes and hats; brick-making, tea-drinking and sport. The information pours from her pen like water from the fountains of Versailles. There is material for a dozen books here, too much for one.

It is a relief to move on to the 10 chapters devoted to individual women, selected in the main because written records exist, in the form of visitors' accounts or their own letters and diaries. Though she still feels the need to detail their furniture, paintings and home-improvements, Ms Baird's writing grows much livelier and less earnest when she lets herself loose on the characters of her chosen ladies.

She is particularly sensitive in her treatment of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. After many difficulties in her youth, Louise wanted to become a nun and was only reluctantly persuaded to submit to the charms of the dashingly restored Charles II, becoming his senior mistress or, as she saw it, his morganatic wife. As opposed to the jovial Nell Gwynn who called herself "the Protestant whore", Louise was unpopular, Catholic, expensive, insecure and French. John Evelyn grumbled ripely about her "prodigal & expensive pleasures" but the 40-odd rooms she occupied and furnished with exquisite taste in the palace at Whitehall were a haven of continental sophistication for the francophile King.

The only other Catholic to earn a chapter is the redoubtable Mary Blount, Duchess of Norfolk, considered by a loyal retainer to be one of the "three greatest women whom God Almighty had ever created" (the others were Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great). Sociable, courteous and tactful, her imagination ran amok when it came to redecorating. An awestruck visitor, one Mr Farington, marvelled at the "Sattin or Taffity" hangings and the "extreem fine Carvings" though he felt constrained to add that "the Toilet was vastly Magnificent, but I think only Gilt Plate." Shame.

A perceptive remark of this last duchess, jotted on the plans of an impossibly vast mansion she never managed to build, could serve as commentary on many of the grandiose schemes of these awesome, indomitable women. She wrote that "if the whole of the plan was finished, she would still add one more room to it, wherein she might be confined as a mad woman."