I read a comment yesterday by Michelle Dockery that there may be a movie in the works. She said she missed her fellow actors in the series, that they had become very close.

Just 'looked up' this book and have lifted this very long comment about it from Amazon.uk. (Is this illegal?)

Perhaps the first thing to note is that the book has nothing to do with 'Downton Abbey' or its story-line other than some outdoor shots took place at Highclere Castle, but the DA name adds kudos to US sales.

But still it might be an interesting read about how a wealthy American girl met and married a rather rakish English M'Lord.

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The
basis of this elegantly written sketch on the life and times of
Catherine Wendell, the Sixth Countess of Carnarvon - with a fleeting
glance at Tilly Losch, the other Sixth Countess- is that it's another
Highclere spin off to cash-in on its television fame. Both women
married Henry, ( better known as Porchey Carnarvon) the Sixth Earl, who
spent his life hunting, shooting and flirting.

The Earl was a
rascal who rode race horses and was an over active sex pest to
womankind. The Carnarvons display courage in declaring the American born
Lady Catherine had a drink problem with bouts of depression and
despair.

Having made a close study of Catherine's life ( and
spoken with people who knew her) I conclude that it is not as simple as
that. The reasons for Catherine almost never being sober are
complicated and alas not well enough explained here.

The ghost
writer could have improved the reader's understanding of Porchey living
with Catherine's drink issue by veering away from the copious and
meaningless references to the Duff Coopers in the book ( since neither
Diana nor Duff make any worthwhile reference to Highclere in their
letters/ memoirs/ diaries ) and instead draw ideas from Debo
Devonshire's worthy and compelling account of her husband, Andrew
Cavendish's darker moments of being heavilly drink infused in the
excellent book, Wait For Me!

I know precisely what Catherine
confided to Almina ( the Fifth Countess, Porchey's mother ). From that
account there are stark differences ( not tackled here ), Catherine
carried burdens including the horrors of a shattered childhood after
her father died suddenly when she was aged eleven.

From Almina
viewing the attractive, reverential, refugee, Catherine, first as a
gold digger ( which she certainly was, she was skint before marriage to
Porchey ) the two women found an enmity, against the same foe,
Porchey, they became life long friends and allies and shared secrets and
lies.

Married off to the Carnarvon heir, in 1922, Porchey's
serial infidelities gave further just cause for Catherine's fall into
inebriation, inflamed by his abuses too ( he repeatedly nagged and
slagged her off), that detail is missing from the narrative, although
the inferences of bullying are there, and that is of some merit.

Catherine's
own dreadful health issues are sidelined. There is a reference in the
book to the glorious years of 1926 and 1927 asserted as the marriage's
happiest period but in fact this was when Catherine suffered a complete
nervous breakdown and was treated for serious gynaecological problems
by the famous Leeds surgeon Sir Berkeley Moynihan, requiring months in a
Swiss sanatorium to recuperate.

The Carnarvons are entitled to
say that another reason for Catherine's depression was the sudden
loss of the 28year-old Reggie Wendell, her jobless brother ( a betting
chum of Porchey's); that grief inevitably hit her ( and others ) very
hard. But the actual event of Reggie's pitiful death scene at
Highclere Castle is not accurately recorded in the book and the people
involved and chronology has been altered or those who compiled this
were not aware ( which is even more damning on the research process as a
whole) of the very full and frank account from Mary Van der Woude (a
Wendell cousin who was actually present when Reggie slipped into
oblivion )). Mary's letters to her mother are held by the wonderful
Portsmouth Athenaeum in the State of Maine -USA - where many of the
remarkable Wendell family papers can be found, ( as well as at Harvard
University).

Sadly ( despite the combined resources of the
Highclere Archives, their family, an international publisher, a ghost
writer, archivists and researchers) many of the other central
particulars linking the story together are unsound, even some shocking
errors including a rewrite of history which claims that Lord Kitchener
died at the Battle of Jutland but which was over before the ship HMS
Hampshire he was travelling on, hit a mine and sunk !

A similar
sloppy error can be found in a reference to the reception after
Catherine married a second time in 1938. One of the hosts, Percy
Griffiths, is mentioned as taking part in fact fell off a horse and died
the previous year!

Good prose masks many howlers as does a
Readers Digest version of some 20th century history frolics with an
irksome tendency to sweep too many irrelevant people and places with
an unnecessary timeline of the non- players in the dull tales of Prime
Ministers, and seedy diplomats downwards including an appalling chunk
of inflated Porchey history on the Abdication crisis ( where Porchey
claims fame in his wildly inaccurate memoirs which are repeated, but is
just as inaccurate as they was when he regaled them to his ghost
writer, Barry Wynne. in 1976 and on the Michael Parkinson Show).

This
extra data pads out the book but it will not appeal to the common
herd ( as Almina, the Fifth Countess dubbed those beneath her ) : those
who follow Downton Abbey, who either lust or are shocked over rape
and drugs and parlour games in and out of jazz clubs in coat tails or
corsetry ) and it all spoils the plot, for Catherine's story is worth
telling, but she was ( like Almina ) no angel, another flaw in the
book, since her infidelities ( that were a clamour for genuine love ) or
her irresponsible gambling excesses ( much to Porchey's horror and
reprimands, and he bet foolishly too ), or Catherine spiting him by
bedding several famous historical figures, of course that gets left
unmentioned de facto but can be inferred from the dramatis persona, if
the reader is smart enough to see through the veneer. Against the odds
too Catherine made a passable Highclere chatelaine, she had good taste
and style in fashion trends and make up innovations of the age. She
was a good looking woman her whole life, despite the knocks and the
fact that she felt despised and humiliated by Porchey and was crippled
emotionally by a perceived embarrassment possessed by her own son.
Catherine was left out in the cold especially when the young Lord
Porchester ( later the Seventh Earl ) walked high with Princesses
Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. The bankrupt granny, Almina, was also
snubbed by the House of Windsor. Almina snubbed back!

Some parts
of the book are adequate and praiseworthy. Catherine's loss of her
second husband Geoffrey Grenfell is moving and well captured. The
interesting testimony of servants and their fate in war time and peace
is fascinating and a redeeming feature of the book is there are some
wonderful photographs.

Lady Almina gets heroic coverage- but it's
not always accurate. By the way, she was NOT an American, she was born
in London, in Bayswater! Nor did she take two days to reach Egypt in
1923, when Lord Carnarvon lay poleaxed, awaiting death. Nor did she
travel all the way out there in a by-plane ! The plane came down in
France and Almina ( after she took ill) had to continue by rail, ship
and rail again before reaching the Continetal Hotel, Cairo. This
pilgrimage was not an expression of love ( Almina was always afraid of
Carnarvon, she never loved him) it was the action of a nurse, who had
saved lives of men in the Great War in her nursing homes, she knew she
could help end Lordy's suffering and did just that.

The lethal
details of the decades of vileness between Almina and her son Porchey
is not surprisingly massaged out of the book. Incidentally, Almina's
second husband, Colonel Dennistoun did not break his hip nor was he in a
wheel chair at least until the mid 1930s when Almina bought him a
motorised chair to sail his miniature boats at Hove and Brighton and on
the Solent. Almina's collection of photographs of the Colonel show him
walking unaided to and from their homes at Temple Dinsley and Eastmore,
Isle of Wight until 1935-6. She married him because he was useful to
her purpose of money laundering the hundreds of thousands of pounds
left to her by her guardian, Alfred de Rothschild in assets at his town
house at 1, Seamore Place, which Almina used as her main home ( not
Highclere ), from 1919 . Moreover ( as can be gleaned from the Court
evidence in Denniston v Dennistoun in 1925 ) Almina first met the
Colonel in 1922, when the Fifth Earl was still very much alive.

The
primary source of the present narrative appears to be the Visitor's
Book at Highclere Castle ( and a sprinkling of family letters ) and
this limits it's scope; as a result it's top heavy with dullness and
streams of dull house party guests, horse racing and shooting chums of
Porchey. The ubiquitous mention of Prince George ( PG) ( later Duke of
Kent who was killed in 1942) is curious and needs more conclusion. PG
was as frequent a presence at Highclere Castle as Prince Victor Duleep
Singh was at the time of the Fifth Earl, the generation before. The
reasons are not properly identified for its possibly similar an
astounding likeness to Duleep's purpose of saving the Carnarvon blood
line. The Sixth Earl's successful career as a jockey and horse breeder
would have been good to see breached , as well as more on his war time
exchanges with his son Porchester in the very interesting and
entertaining Carnarvon Letters, published in 1992.

Catherine's
pedigree ( which is triumphantly matched into American history and well
known figures at that, with a family tree to show them off, well,
that's fine ) but her childhood ( with her siblings and Wendell
grandmother) in New York and in Kitterey, near Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, USA gets only a few lines as does her important
developmental years at the home of the Griffiths family ( who were well
to do cousins of Catherine's mother, Marian ) at Sandridgebury,
Sandridge, St Albans, Hertfordshire where her mother ( a remarkable
marriage fixer to equal Dolly Levi ) was given a roof over her head in
1911 after sensibly fleeing with her four children far away from her
late husband's creditors. The part the Griffiths' played in Catherine's
life is insufficiently chartered.

We are also left knowing very
little ( or anything that is reliable ) about Catherine's colourful
dad, Jacob Wendell Jnr, ( a businessman turned actor in New York), his
rogue gene pool, his influences upon her, or follow up of his other
daughter, Philippa, Catherine's younger sister who went on to be the
12th Countess of Galloway. The book is quite wrong in recording Randolph
Stewart ( Philippa's only son, the present 13th Earl of Galloway ) as
being an epileptic. They can't bring themselves to say ` schizophrenic'
but is a more accurate term. I've talked to friends of Randolph.
Moreover, his whole life ( in the book : An Unlikely Countess Lily
Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway:) was ruined after his parents
forced him to be lobotomized. Catherine was his godmother, she could
not do anything to stop the butchery that still haunts this poor wretch
daily.

The Highclere book ends suddenly in 1945 before so much
else befalls the main characters. Is Catherine ( saved it seemed by a
conversion from alcoholism to Roman Catholicism) destined to spend
her Christmases at retreats as plain `Mary Herbert' among the Bethany
nuns? Does she live happy ever after, or not? After the Tanis
Guinness affair ( a girl whom Porchey attempted to marry ( even before
divorced from Catherine : a story well told in the book ) who else does
Porchey try to line up as his next duped Countess? How were Porchey
and Catherine's last days spent, in more than just one sentence,
please!!! And what of dear old Tilly Losch, the dancer who married
Porchey ( for hard cash and a wobbly coronet ) in 1939, what became of
the dancing Countess of Carnarvon? What a gal! You will have to look
elsewhere for the answers!

Does this current book leave one's
appetite whetting for more? The answer, probably is yes and no. Yes, if
it's more accurately drawn ( which would mean Olympic somersaults in
parts in this and in the earlier book on Lady Almina ); but no, if it
is all another contrived piece of too much hokum history with real ( or
more like sugary ) pieces thrown into a sponge cake like glace
cherries. There are not always happy endings, Downton shows us this
bitter truth well. Whilst this text is as craftily worked as a Downton
Abbey script the real truth ( they keep telling us it is here but isn't,
not in total ). That disturbing, hidden truth is even more
astonishing.
There the courage shown initially in revealing Catherine's drink problem ends!

Overall,
I found the book readable as a piece of writing but on facts as
difficult as a gobstopper to swallow whole. The poor research is bad
show given the extent of the resources available to the Carnarvon and
publisher's army of backroom workers. The book is no more than a quick
fix on Catherine's life. As with its earlier title on Almina, another
Carnarvon Countess there are misdemeanours in the story telling and
they know it! The sloppiness goes all the way to the end with
Catherine's age at death being given as 79 (in fact she was 76). I
would have been more than happy to co-operate to ensure that all the
errors were expunged.