As part of an exhibition highlighting the roles if 18th century women in stately homes, Castle Howard is staging a specially-commissioned dramatisation. Sarah Foster reports.

IT might be a conversation between any two women. Huddled over cups of tea, they gossip conspiratorially about trivial matters until with some embarrassment, the younger woman admits to finding her role as mistress of the house more difficult than she had anticipated. Her friend, experienced in these matters, smiles knowingly and offers words of reassurance and advice.

But these women are dressed in the finery of 18th century gentlewomen and far from the conflicting demands of their jobs and home lives, they are discussing how best to oversee the running of a vast country house.

The 25-minute dramatisation, involving fictional characters Sylvia Sinclair and her friend Lady Adelaide, is devised and enacted by two social history specialists from Century Adventures. It was commissioned by Castle Howard, near York, as part of the Maids and Mistresses exhibition, a unique experiment running at seven Yorkshire stately homes to highlight the relatively unexplored area of women's roles in such houses. The dramatisation will run at hourly intervals throughout Saturday and Sunday afternoons and will complement a display focusing on the lives of Castle Howard women throughout history.

Lucy Adlington, from Century Adventures, says items such as letters and journals from the display were invaluable to her research. "Isabella Byron, who was aunt to the famous poet and mistress of Castle Howard, wrote a 'How to' book including all her wisdom and knowledge. Usually, the information we glean is from things scribbled in the margins. She worked on the kitchen garden and had quite a colourful life romantically," she says.

According to Lucy, despite the 'ladies of leisure' tag attached to 18th century gentlewomen, they bore huge domestic responsibilities. "People talk about running a small business and that's pretty much what it was like. And you had to look pretty at the same time," she says.

One of the major challenges for the mistress of a large house was managing the servants, which proves difficult for Sylvia Sinclair in the dramatisation. "The servants are all cheating and snaffling things from the kitchen and it's a big problem," says Lucy. "The relationship between the mistress of the house and her servants was very uneasy."

As well as advising Sylvia on how to keep her servants in check, Lady Adelaide instructs her on the fashions and manners of the 1790s, when the conversation is set.

"The French Revolution is throwing up a whole lot of new ideas about things like cooking and fashion," says Lucy. "The fashion is not to look like an aristocrat any more because you don't want to go off to the guillotine. The new French fashion is to have men and women sitting together at dinner. It's also to be more mannerly - what we would associate with the Jane Austen Regency period."

Yet despite the buttoned-up etiquette of the late 18th century, Lucy says there was plenty of scope for scandal. "As far as scandals go, you read between the lines and there were all sorts of unsuitable liaisons but no more than nowadays," she says. "There was one book of the time which said wives shouldn't have someone pretty working for them. Affairs definitely went on and gentlemen were not expected to have the same standard of behaviour as women."

The title of the dramatisation - The Domestic Goddess at Castle Howard - is an nod to self-styled domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, perceived as the modern archetypal homemaker. Lucy says that in the 18th century, as now, women were the linchpins of home and family life. "The whole picture that you build up of women's lives is fascinating," she says. "You realise how busy they were and what an incredible range of knowledge they had. They knew everything from how to get red wine stains out of the carpet to how to fix marital problems."

While she believes that life could be hard for a gentlewoman, especially if the lifestyle didn't suit her, Lucy says it was no more difficult than for modern women. "When you read the women's accounts and journals, they seem to spend a lot of time trying to do their duty and make the best of things," she says. "But we are trying to do all the things that they had servants for as well as our jobs. I think that if anything, modern women are more dutiful."

* The Domestic Goddess at Castle Howard is being staged at 12pm, 1pm, 2pm and 3pm on Saturday and Sunday.