She's one of my all time favorite writers, but since she died back in 1983, and her many novels have gone in and out of print over the years, she's not well known any more. I recently purchased these three books in new editions, because the ones I've owned for probably 40 years are falling apart and cannot be read any longer.
The Town House is the first of her House Trilogy. The other two books are The House at Old Vine and The House at Sunset. It starts in about 1400, and tells the story of a peasant who runs away from the manor he'd been born to, and eventually winds up owning a house and some land outside the fictional village of Baildon and founding a family there that persists through generations. But it's mainly the story of the house itself, and the story of that house is carried through to the present day of when the series was written, which was in the mid-1950s I believe.
What I like best is her narrative technique. Each section is narrated by someone else, and the sections are linked by interludes which connect the one before to the one after. That way she is able to move the story through time effectively. What's also very interesting is that because of the different narrators, you can get very different views of the same person. One especially interesting one is where a young girl narrates events, then later someone who knew her when she was an old lady has a completely different take on what happened back then.
Many of her other novels are also narrated this way. She created a rich and detailed history of that fictitious part of England, and you get to know the families and the life over a period of nearly a thousand years.
Another pair of her books I especially like are Gad's Hall and the Haunting of Gad's Hall, which I originally read out of order, and it actually makes more sense to me that way, even though usually to read in the wrong order makes things confusing. I might repurchase those books, and some others of hers as they get reprinted.
Anyway, for anyone who likes historical fiction, anything and everything Norah Lofts has written is worth reading. Her characters are not modern people dressed in old clothes, which is all too often what you found in historical fiction (and I'm looking at YOU, Philippa Gregory), but real people of whatever era she's writing about.
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