ON 23 JANUARY 1889, Mary Elcho wrote to Arthur that the last of her house guests at Stanway had finally departed. On the whole, she thought the nine-day gathering had been a success, but confessed that she had ‘rather counted the days for them to go’. One of the most beloved hostesses of her generation, Mary was sometimes an anxious party-giver, and for this particular one she’d had a lot on her mind. Two weeks before, she and her three small children had barely escaped with their lives when a late-night fire destroyed Clouds, the Wyndhams’ newly completed mansion in Wiltshire. She was also midway through her fourth pregnancy in five years of marriage, and out of sorts because she would miss a visit to Dublin to see Arthur before he returned to England in late February. The fact that Mary did not cancel this winter party or even limit its duration attests to the importance of extended visiting for the late-Victorian elites, as well as to the resources that this privileged class devoted to one of its most formative institutions of sociability.

Literary sources provide a variety of approaches for understanding these occasions. Novelists have depicted country house gatherings as scenes of Arcadian retreat, of coarseness and buffoonery, of melodrama or snobbish in-fighting, of Jamesian emotional purgatory or theatre of the absurd. Social historians generally choose a functionalist approach. Leonore Davidoff and Mark Girouard present the rituals of aristocratic socialising as a serious business used to structure elite marriage options, control social mobility and broker politics in an era of dramatic social change. From this perspective, Mary's party served several purposes: the Pembrokes were being repaid for earlier hospitality at Wilton; Lord Elcho, Hugo, had some game to clear out with a few days of shooting; and DD Balfour (no relation to Arthur) was being introduced to other members of the Souls in the intimate setting of the country house. Yet the novelists’ depictions remain compelling reminders of the intricate emotional dynamics and multiple experiences that lay at the heart of this semi-ritualised institution of elite social life. If privately experienced phenomena such as desire, boredom or nostalgia are the creations of history and social circumstance, so too are the intimate encounters of small-scale sociability. As the forms of elite country house entertaining changed over time, the psychological demands of these events were transformed as well.