Liza Campbell was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle, as featured in Macbeth. Her father Hugh, the 25th Thane of Cawdor, inherited good looks, wealth, an ancient title, three stately homes and 100,000 acres of land.
But increasingly overwhelmed by his enormous responsibilities, Hugh turned to drink, drugs, and extramarital affairs. Until the castle was transformed into an arena of reckless profligacy, abuse and terrifying domestic violence, leading to the abrupt termination of a legacy that had been passed down through the family for six hundred years.
Title Deeds is a dark yet funny, contemporary fairy story about growing up in an old family where ancient curses and grisly past events are matched by the turmoil of a confusing and frightening present.
Liza Campbell shows how even enormous wealth and privilege can hide unspoken abuse and misery: and what it is like to watch your father destroy himself and everything he holds dear.
About the Author
Liza Campbell is a columnist for Harpers & Queen, an artist, writer and calligrapher. She lives in London with her two children.
Industry Reviews
The allure of Scottish history and legend woven through a tragic modern life. Granted, it's not and never was actually Macbeth's castle: That lure for the unwary is based solely on Shakespeare's warping of a careless chronicler's embellishments on the life of an 11th-century Scottish king who died 300 years before the first stone was laid at Cawdor Castle, near Inverness. "The Fall of the House of Cawdor" would be an apt replacement subtitle, and one for which the author would not have to excuse any overstatement. Campbell's memoir begins at her family's estate in Wales, then moves to the chill and forbidding Scottish castle she would come to love. Edged with relentless wit, it unravels the life of her father, the 25th Thane of Cawdor (6th Earl of same), Hugh John Vaughan Campbell. Liza and her four siblings, including younger brother Colin, sole Cawdor heir per the British peerage's practice of primogeniture, witnessed the gradual degeneration of their father's marriage, his estate, his sanity and his health. Early on, his antics seemed merely Pythonesque: chasing anything in skirts, constantly drinking, especially while driving, and serially wrecking expensive cars. It was all quite puzzling to the kids, whose face time with Dad consisted mainly of humorous jabs inevitably followed by a sarcastic right cross. Only in his letters to Liza at school did a gentle, loving father occasionally reveal himself. Most of the time, though, he was a monster: At one hideous moment, he drunkenly orders her into his bed for what seems to be shaping up as an incestuous liaison until he passed out. On cocaine, it turns out, he drove his wife from their marriage and, prior to his 1990 death at 60 from cancer and a compromised immune system, secretly disinherited his son, effectively terminating forever the family's cherished "title deed."Nightmarish memoir that gives fiction a run for its money. (Kirkus Reviews)
