House of Fiction

March 15, 2021
How the fictional houses found throughout British literature "act as a prism for focusing and diffracting the concerns of the world in which they were built." Employing a great books-style survey of English novelists, Richardson, who has written multiple books on architecture and design, explores why people enjoy reading about houses in fiction. She begins in the 18th century with Laurence Sterne, moves into the 19th with the likes of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and concludes with such modern writers as J.G. Ballard, Ian Fleming, and Julian Barnes. Richardson starts by linking the development of the English novel to the theatrical farces of the 18th and 19th centuries. She suggests that Sterne used the "intimacy" of the house in Tristram Shandy to "squeeze comic tension from each room," just as would a farce. For Austen, country houses and estates became places to observe the upper-class "social scene." As symbols, they allowed her to reflect on such issues as property rights and why those rights, which favored men, were important to the women of her era. Dickens, by contrast, took a more personal approach to houses, infusing works like Great Expectations with fictionalized impressions of his own bittersweet "youngest memories." In the 20th century, Evelyn Waugh elegized the English country estates immortalized by earlier novelists like Austen. In the aftermath of two world wars, the old social order on which they had been built was permanently "blown apart." Ballard, Fleming, and Barnes emphasized the ugliness of what emerged in the aftermath, suggesting that "current and future housing [were] without art or promise." This well-researched compendium, which also discusses the relationships of writers' homes to their fictional creations, will appeal most to fans of British literature or those interested in literary representations of home and hearth. Literary history from an intriguing perspective.

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