Oconee Heritage Center announces Book Club

The Oconee Heritage Center announces a new bi-monthly book club. Selections for 2015 feature books set in the Gilded Age, which span from the late 1800s to World War I. Through these selections the club will discuss what was happening in various parts of the world at that time. All book selections are available at the Oconee County Public Library. The first book club event takes place on Feb. 26 at 6pm, explains Oconee Heritage Center curator and director Leslie White. “We will read “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey” by Fiona Carnarvon. “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey” tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration and setting for Julian Fellowes’s Emmy Award-winning PBS show Downton Abbey, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the fifth Countess of Carnarvon. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon’s ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman. This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle.” For more information about the Oconee Heritage Center’s Book Club visit www.oconeeheritagecenter.org.