Downton Abbey's Lady Edith brings her 'bastard' home. Almost.

Let's give Julian Fellowes, writer and creator of Downton Abbey, kudos for letting Lady Edith have her own controlled meltdowns regarding the daughter she just had out of "wedlock" with her married lover! And then for not leaving the child in Switzerland, despite the stern admonitions of Aunt Rosamund, who tells her in no uncertain terms she must forget the child, let her grow up with the good Swiss people who are caring for her, and if she, Lady Edith, should find the father who may or may not reappear she must never tell him! And besides that, you will have other children!

My god, doesn't that sound like the advice a lot of us got from the old days when we gave up our children? Forget, hide, never tell, you will have other children. Right....

But plucky Lady Edith is not down for the count. The exact line escapes me this morning, but the chauffeur-turned-family member, Thomas Branson, kicks Edith into gear about doing what she really wants to: bring the baby home where she can see her grow up. But of course, she can't bring the baby into Downton Abbey itself--quelle horreur! The groundwork having been laid in previous episodes, the Good Farmer Drewe, indebted to the Downton family, will take the baby and raise her, knowing full well whose child it is. Mr. Drewe and Edith will keep this secret between the two of them. 


Fellowes has done his work well here. Edith (played superbly by Laura Carmichael) has always been the quiet rebel in the family--unlike the sprightly Lady Rose who was ready to marry a black man, partly to shock her mother--and we have been waiting for this all along since Lady Edith began her relationship with a married editor, Michael. The question of course is whether anybody else in the family (besides the two who already know, Dowager Countess Violet and Rosamund) will figure out who the girl really is as she starts to grow up and look like her mum. At one point, Edith corrects her Grandmother Violet and says, can we stop referring to her as "it" and call her "she"? I wanted to jump up and say, Yes! At another point, when Rosamund tells Edith she will have other children, Edith looks stricken, conveying: that ain't going to make up for losing this one. Edith actually tells her Aunt Rosamund that she doesn't understand because she's never been a mother. You go Girl!

Lorraine/Edith in senior picture

Of course we don't really think that Michael is out of the picture. The poor fellow is married, all right, but to a woman in a loony bin, and under British law of the times, he can't divorce her. However, if he becomes a German citizen (iffy after the war), he can, and since love conquers almost all, he goes off to Germany. There he immediately gets beat up by some "brown shirts" for speaking his mind. Thus his disappearance when there might have been a hasty wedding instead of an aborted abortion, followed by a lengthy trip to Switzerland "to improve Aunt Rosamund's French." We assume that Michael will return next season (we hope so!) and the plot line of the child's true parentage comes into play. 

The similarities to my own story cannot be ignored here: I had no sisters, but if I had, I would have been the unfortunate one, with the less than comely looks, with the suitor I did love falling to maternal interference (his mother!) and then not showing up when he should have (earlier Edith is left in the lurch right at the wedding ceremony), and then...me falling in love with a married columnist at the newspaper where I worked following my romantic misfortunes. So you better believe this story line was the one I was following! Lucky for Edith, no matter what happens next, she is going to know where the child is and be able to watch over her. A very open adoption.

Lorraine now

In real life today, one acquaintance of mine who has been extremely critical of my involvement in adoptee rights and all things adoption is a huge fan of the series. She herself comes from an elite family not unlike the Grantham clan of Downton Abbey, and for reasons unknown to me has always been volubly upset because of my finding my daughter, bringing her into my life, and my continuing involvement in unsealing original birth certificates--so much so that one of her sons thinks his mother may be hiding a first child herself! My neighbor is rather elderly now, and watches the series repeatedly, and I can't help wonder how Edith's story line is touching her. Does she have a secret child on another continent? Is her cold reaction to adoptee rights and first mother grief because her oldest friend from boarding school is an adoptive grandmother? I was told by her best friend's husband once that "I am their worst nightmare" of a birth mother. His lucky son went to Siberia to adopt, so it's unlikely their grandson will be reuniting with anybody.

This isn't the first time that Julian Fellowes has dealt with "bastard" children. In Gosford Park, for which he won an Academy Award for best original screenplay, the story twists on a child raised in an orphanage who returns to the Downton-Abbey like home where he was conceived. If you haven't seen this movie, directed by Robert Altman, and are a fan (or not) of Downton Abbey, why wait? It's totally delicious, and one of my favorite films of all time. Maggie Smith, in a role not unlike her salty Violet in Downton Abbey, is priceless, and Helen Mirren gives one of her stellar performances.

As for Fellowes, he is invested in children without parents, for he is a benefactor of Families for Children, an adoption agency in England. Don't know more about it so I have no comment. One last note: if my nose in that high school photograph looks rather straight, trust me it was the work of a retoucher. I had a huge ski-jump of a nose then. --lorraine 
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From FMF

Downton Abbey and what you won't learn from those happy adoption agency websites

Gosford Park 
Multiple story-lined drama set in 1932, showing the lives of upstairs guest and downstairs servants at a party in a country house in England. As a hunting party gathers, no one is aware that before the weekend is over, someone will be murdered twice! The police are baffled, the servants know that almost everyone had a motive. You can stream for $2.99.

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