Skip to main content

The Dowager Countess Knows Best

This Sunday, the finale for Season 2 of Downton Abbey will air on PBS.  If you haven't yet discovered this work of historical fiction from across the pond, go watch Season 1 on Netflix right now.  Then you will be ready to catch up with Season 2.  There are a few episodes available streaming on the PBS website but you can't find the whole season there. (Interestingly, Season 2 is already available on DVD so I guess some chaps already know how the finale will play out...)


I love it when a story completely captures your attention like Downton Abbey has for me.  It's got everything I love about Mad Men set 45 years earlier...in England.  In fact, if you ever watched Mad Men and thought, "Wow! We sure have come a long way since the 1960s!" your mind will be completely blown by the class structure and social hierarchy of English society in the early 20th century.  They were just so darn...proper.   


Even though it is a proper British tale, there is still all the love, scandal, sacrifice, and drama that accompanies any good soap opera. 


I find myself wondering in each episode where exactly the three Grantham sisters will end up. Will Mary follow her heart or do what she thinks she must in the name of propriety? Will Sybil be happy with her beau even though he isn't "of noble birth"? Is Edith doomed to be a spinster aunt?  


The one who steals the show, though, is Maggie Smith in her role as Violet, the Dowager Countess. She is a bastion of the old guard, not quite comfortable with the changes that the 20th century seems to bring with every turn of the calendar.  Some of my favorite bits of dialogue:






Lady Sybil (her granddaughter): No one ever learned anything from a governess except for French and how to curtsy.
Dowager Countess: What more do you need?
---------------------------------------------------------
Lady Mary (another granddaughter): Sybil is entitled to her opinions, Granny.
Dowager Countess: No. She isn't until she is married. Then her husband will tell her what her opinions are.
---------------------------------------------------------
And this final gem: I'm a woman...I can be as contrary as I choose.


So until Mad Men returns next month, I am happy to enjoy the rest of Downton Abbey.  Hope you enjoy it too.  Cheers!

Comments

  1. I, too, LOVE this show! I want to go back in time and live in this show! Even if it is only as a house maid... I’d like to think I’d be like Anna. Do you know if there are working on a season 3? I can’t get enough! Oh, and the line about being contrary is one of my favorites too!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9.  Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole.  There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them."    I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known.  This

The Stages of Grief: COVID Edition

It's 2020. It's almost Christmas. We're still in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, we are experiencing what appears to be an incredible surge that is exerting tremendous pressure on our healthcare and social service system. The headlines are clear: we're not done with this madness and December 31, 2020 will not magically be the "end of it".  Earlier in the year, our family thought about whether we might be able to travel at this time. We thought that maybe the curve would be flat enough that we could take a few days away from home during the Christmas holidays. We realized that the pandemic would still be happening, but with the right protections and with prolific mask usage, we could get a much-needed change of scenery. During what is now (clearly) a delusional thought process, we booked a stay in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for the week of December 19th. Spoiler alert: we canceled the trip almost two weeks ago.  Canceling this trip was not a tragedy. In fact, I

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen.  If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life.  I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into