Though it was a short TV season, longer than a miniseries but shorter than Game of Thrones, the melodramatic yet quasi-literary world of Downton Abbey Season Two created a life and an afterlife.  We savor every tidbit from the upcoming Season Three: Shirley Maclaine photos are emerging from the set, director Brian Percival will film the highly anticipted movie version of The Book Thief.  And Lady Mary's potential wedding dress is contempated in a Vanity Fair web slide show.

To read a "documentary" version of the life, especially in advance of the 1920s and -- might it be possible? -- the 1930s, read the great works of Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate where there really is a dowager countess character in the form of Lady Montdore and her snobbish but always heartfelt ripostes.  Read aloud from anywhere in the book.  After hearing that one sister at the ball was training to be a vet, Lady Montdore says: "First sensible thing that I've heard about any of them.  No point in cluttering up the ballrooms with girls who look like that; it's simply not fair on anybody."