fabled fortress; Liza Campbell writes of life behind the drawbridge of a legendary Scottish castle.(Book review)

Byline: Eve Macsweeney

Cawdor Castle, writes Liza Campbell in A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle (Thomas Dunne), "has the romantic cachet of being one of the few addresses featured in a Shakespeare play that can also be found on an AA road map." (As "Thane of Cawdor," Macbeth is forever associated with the locale.) But life as the daughter of the twenty-fifth Thane of Cawdor-"thane" is a Scots title similar to "earl"-while deeply privileged and steeped in astonishing history, turns out to have been far from charmed. Campbell, her mother, and her four siblings lived in the frightening shadow of her father's increasingly diabolical behavior, fueled by alcoholism, which culminated in a decisively brutal posthumous blow to Campbell's brother, his heir.

As she struggles to reconcile love and shame in this courageous memoir, Campbell offers a fascinating glimpse into the nuanced snobberies of the British aristocracy, which earned the author a slew of tabloid coverage when the book was published in the U.K. "Sticking your little finger out when holding a cup was frowned upon," she writes. "So were chewing gum, poodles, Alsatians, Corgis, cats . . . custard, the words Mum, Dad, phone, partake, cheers, cheerio . . . most ornamental conifers, any talk of money, and the color mauve." Their heritage was so firmly drummed into the Campbell children that tales of swashbuckling ancestors and ...